IBM Takes Database War To Next Level With DB2 8.1 Release

For this release, the company beefed up self-tuning and monitoring and integrated more business intelligence into the core database, said Paul Rivot, director of database server and business intelligence at IBM Software.

One goal was faster query performance on multidimensional clusters. That would enable customers to perform transaction processing and analytic queries on the same database rather than offloading the analysis to an expensive data warehouse. Rivot said IBM has cut the time it takes to perform business intelligence queries by 90 percent on average compared with the previous release.

Janet Perna, general manager of data management systems at IBM, said the new database has more than 400 functional improvements. "The multidimensional clustering lets customers physically cluster frequently used data together on disk, which improves performance significantly. If you think of analytical apps that are cubes in nature,'give me the sales by region, by time',if we can physically cluster that data on disk, we can grab it and access it faster."

John Schwartz, vice president of business development at Noospherics, a Reisterstown, Md., integrator, said IBM has made strides in self-healing and management. "When you deploy complex J2EE applications across multiple servers, this self-healing, self-management thing is a big boost," Schwartz said. "They've pretty much taken the database [tuning out of the equation, cutting time there by one-third."

Meanwhile, hundreds of SQL Server developers converged last week in Seattle at the Professional Association of SQL Server conference to hear Microsoft's game plan. Microsoft reiterated plans to ship SQL Server Service Pack 3 by year's end. The 64-bit version of SQL Server is on tap to ship next April, in tandem with the delayed Windows.Net Server 2003 operating system.

Most importantly, Microsoft repeated its plan to have a beta for Yukon, the next major release of the database, out in the first half of next year, with the final version due by year's end 2003. These dates, however, are subject to change.