Cutting The Management Needs Of Databases

IBM is giving its DB2 database software a major upgrade, with new federated data-management and self-managing capabilities. IBM, which is in a tight database race with Oracle, says DB2 version 8 will be pushed particularly to midsize companies.

Federated management is a way for DB2 to read and update data in databases from other vendors, according to IBM. Using it, people can view and manipulate multiple-vendor databases as if they were one. Earlier versions offered only read functions. And new multidimensional data-clustering technology is expected to speed up business-intelligence queries.

Autonomic, or self-managing, features include a database-configuration and tools that monitor a database's performance and give advice when problems develop. IBM figures autonomic capabilities will persuade at least some resource-strapped would-be buyers.

It's also combining the previous Enterprise Edition and Enterprise Edition Extended versions, sold for transaction-processing and data warehousing applications, respectively, into Enterprise Server Edition. That's priced at $25,000 per CPU or $999 per server plus $249 per user. A workgroup version runs $7,500 per CPU.

More than 35,000 customers downloaded beta versions of DB2 version 8, according to IBM, and 85% of them indicated that they plan to upgrade during the next few months. DB2 has an installed base of 400,000 customers.