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October 18, 1999

IBM DB2:
DB2 Upgrade Disappoints
IBM's recent update to its flagship database adds features that could make your business more competitive, including new support for disconnected users. But on the whole, it may leave users wanting more.

By Andy Feibus

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arge-scale database applications--the kind hosted by Oracle or DB2--tend to be core business applications. As such, IT groups face a difficult question each time their database application undergoes a substantial upgrade. Clearly, only fools tinker with a critical application lightly. The process is expensive and fraught with danger. At the same time, smart IT shops know that new tools can provide new insights into a business and its customers through improved online analytical processing or help inform employees by extending access to information through more of the workforce.

Indeed, major upgrades to database systems have tended to focus on these technologies in recent years. IBM's latest upgrade of DB2 is no exception. In version 6.1, you'll find broader support for client platforms, including a Satellite Edition that serves frequently disconnected users, more flexible connections to non-DB2 data sources, and several technologies that improve performance and administration. Unless your immediate needs demand one of these improvements, however, I found the upgrade too cumbersome and some of the new features too poorly implemented to recommend it to most DB2 installations.

DB2's core strengths remain unchanged. It's a highly reliable and scalable database system that runs on hosts ranging from microcomputers to mainframes. It offers all of the key components of a crucial database system: replicated databases, online analytical processing servers, and the ability to integrate with other enterprise systems. In this release, IBM added several new technologies that promise to improve on DB2's core strengths.

I was particularly eager to try DB2's new Java Stored Procedure Builder. This tool helps create stored procedures using DB2's Java environment without directly dealing with the Java code itself. JSPB presents a graphical interface for defining queries, inserts the resulting SQL statement into the necessary Java framework, and then compiles and installs the code as a stored procedure. The process works quite well for creating simple stored procedures.

Users can launch the JSPB as a standalone program from within the DB2 Control Center or from any one of several integrated development environments: IBM VisualAge for Java 3.0 (due before year's end), Microsoft Visual C++, or Microsoft Visual Basic. Particularly with VisualAge for Java's release some months off, I was disappointed to find no integration with Microsoft Visual J++. After all, JSPB creates Java procedures, but doesn't provide any real support for editing the Java code. Java is the basis for all logic within the stored procedure, so the poor support for interacting with the Java code is glaring.

IBM has added a couple of new technologies that let DB2 applications easily interact with data stored elsewhere. This sort of integration with other enterprise applications can create a powerful competitive edge for your business, and IBM's implementation works largely as advertised. Support for Microsoft's OLE DB specification is the more strategic of the two additions. Through OLE DB, a DB2 application can examine data from other systems as if they were DB2 tables (albeit they are read-only objects). By tapping data found in applications such as Microsoft Index Server or Lotus Domino Server, your core database application has access to ancillary data that would otherwise have required a lot more coding to use.

Previously available only on DB2 for AIX, DataLinks is now available for Windows NT systems. This simple technology, which lets you interact with external files as if they were data stored in DB2 fields, makes incorporating certain kinds of information much easier. For example, a recruiter who uses DB2 to track clients can create links to resumé files stored in a conventional file system. In this example, the DB2 application can treat resumés as if they were conventional DB2 data, but users continue to store and have access to resume as discrete files.

In Version 6.1, IBM has also improved DB2's performance in several ways. Perhaps the most important improvement is in the implementation of DB2 Connect, which should boost the performance of applications that connect to DB2 mainframe applications, such as a Web application hosted on a OS/390 system. Through techniques such as connection pooling, DB2 Connect promises to reduce the overhead created by frequently disconnected applications, such as most Web applications, by reducing the time spent creating and tearing down connections.

New to this release is the Index Advisor Utility, which suggests optimal indexes for tables based on a defined workload. To some degree, this tool makes optimizing DB2 databases easier. Through the Index Advisor, a user defines a set of queries and SQL actions routinely performed against a database. The Index Advisor examines these queries and determines the best indexes for the tables accessed by the workload. The Index Advisor even let me record SQL statements performed over a given period of time, useful for processes that occur in a particular sequence, to create a more realistic workload. While the Index Advisor is useful when creating a new application, it doesn't go far enough in providing help; DB2 really needs to have the ability to continuously monitor the actual queries being performed and suggest index tuning based on the queries that get executed over time.

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