DB2 Builds on Existing Capabilities
As the foundation for e-business, DB2(R) Universal Database(TM) is the industry's first multimedia, Web-ready relational database management system, strong enough to meet the demands of large corporations and flexible enough to serve medium-sized and small businesses. DB2 continues to supports the following key capabilities and benefits:
· Technology Leadership
· Partner solutions
· Manageability
· Business Intelligence
· Multimedia extensibility
· Web enablement
· Federation
Technology Leadership
With its core competency in database technology and a strong emphasis on software marketing, IBM has delivered more high-quality database technology to market faster than anyone else in the industry. IBM invented relational database technology and SQL. This trend to innovate technology has continued with query optimization, distributed query, extensibility, federation and now XML and Web Services. IBM holds more patents, and written more white papers on data management than any other database vendor. DB2 Universal Database is the culmination of this effort. With DB2 Universal Database, you can rest assured that you are getting the best database technology available today from a vendor with a bright future and the best record of service and support in the industry
Partner Solutions
DB2 Universal database is capable of supporting a broad range data management applications with excellent performance and reliability. As a result, a large number of industry solution providers, including SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, i2, J D Edwards and thousands of others, have adopted DB2 to support their applications; or adapted their tools to support DB2. This allows you to more quickly satisfy your requirements by buying rather than building solutions.
Manageability
DB2 Universal database is one of the easiest databases in the industry to set up, use, and manage. It includes a complete suite of GUI administration tools that allow for easy installation, administration, and remote operations. DB2 greatly reduces the complexity of data management by eliminating, simplifying,
and automating many tasks traditionally associated with maintaining an enterprise-class database. Some of these advances are the first implementation of the SMART (Self-Managing and Resource Tuning) project and the first steps towards making full autonomic computing a reality for database implementations.
Health Monitoring: With V8.1, DB2 introduces two new features to help you monitor the health of your DB2 systems:
· Health Monitor
· Health Center
These tools add a management-by-exception capability to DB2 V8.1 by alerting you to potential system health issues and providing advice about resolving them. You can address health issues before they become real problems that affect your system.
Control Center: DB2 V8.1 Control Center has been rearchitected for improved DBA productivity and ability to manage DB2 servers from anywhere by using standard a Web browser or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Configuration Advisor: DB2 V8 introduces a new Configuration Advisor and AUTOCONFIGURE command that recommends and optionally applies new values for buffer pool sizes, database configuration, and database manager configuration. This DB2 V8.1 enhancement provides initial tuning for a database, to which additional tuning can be applied. AUTOCONFIGURE can also be used with the CREATE DATABASE command to configure databases as soon as they are created.
Enhancements to the LOAD Utility and the Load Wizard: A single simplified online load utility has been added to simplify the process of loading data into both single partition and multipartition database environments.
Load from cursor (cross-loader): DB2 V8.1 LOAD command has been enhanced to allow loading from a cursor. This new option can be used to provide high speed transfer of data from any data source that can be queried with a SELECT statement. An additional benefit of loading from a cursor is ability to complete load operation in a single step without a need for cumbersome export and file transfer steps.
MQT delta refresh after load: DB2 has enhanced the support for Materialized Query Tables (MQTs, previously known as ASTs) to allow them to be able to be incrementally refreshed after a load append operation. The MQT will be available during the load operation and once the load operation completes the data that was appended to the table can be incrementally added to the MQT.
Improvements to Statistics Collection:
· New options for usability (ON ALL COLUMNS, ON KEY COLUMNS, ability to specify individual index names)
· New statistics for LIKE predicate processing
· Ability to specify distribution statistics limits at the table and column level
· Ability to perform sampling for detailed index statistics to improve performance
· Ability to gather statistics during index creation
Online Inspect and Improved Trace Performance: DB2 V8.1 enhances the customers ability to examine and diagnose error conditions by delivering a much improved trace facility with greatly improved performance and an online Database Analysis and Recovery Tool (DB2DART). The new trace facility provides very low overhead, high performance operation that allows customers to have tracing activated in the most demanding production environments. The on-line DART tool allows database administrators to verify the integrity of DB2 data on disk without taking the database off-line.
Other Manageability enhancements includes:
· Storage Manager for a comprehensive analysis of disk usage, data distribution and skew, clustering and other attributes of the storage subsystem usage.
· Enhanced support for operation and administration of partitioned databases by utilizing procedures and tools for multipartition load, backup, and restore as well as simplified procedures for adding and removing database partitions and redistributing data over existing database partitions.
Business Intelligence
DB2 Universal database has unique strengths in supporting business intelligence applications such as data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP). DB2 leads the industry in parallel database technology and query optimization resulting in proven ability to help customers find competitive advantage, better customer service, or reduced costs by mining their data for the knowledge required to make better decisions. Furthermore, this does not require the additional expense of a specialized database. DB2 provides a single database that can be used across an enterprise for all data management requirements from OLAP to OLTP.
Multidimensional Data Clustering
The DB2 V8.1 enhancement marks the introduction of multidimensional clustering (MDC) technology, which is an innovative method for flexible, continuous, and automatic organization and storage of data along multiple dimensions instead of the more common data clustering in a single dimension. Using MDC to organize a table along multiple dimensions such as year and region can result in significant improvement in query performance for BI applications. Using MDC can also significantly reduce the overhead of data maintenance operations, such as reorganization, and index maintenance during insert, update, and delete operations.
Multimedia Extensibility
DB2 Universal database allows you to extend the capabilities of the database to meet your specific organizational requirements. This includes the ability to support more advanced applications involving multimedia data such as documents, images, audio, video, and spatial data. You can develop applications that use technology to gain competitive advantage in ways not previously possible or practical, and you can save costs by extending DB2 to support these new applications.
Web Enablement
One of the key new application areas is e-business. DB2 Universal Database is fully integrated with web technology so that data can be easily accessed from the Internet or from the company intranet. This allows you to quickly build e-business applications that will provide competitive advantage, greater customer service or reduced costs.
XML: DB2 V8.1 delivers industry-leading support for XML, the standard data interchange for the next generation of business-to-business solutions. XML document storage and retrieval forms an integral part of DB2 and is provided as a combination of SQL language (library of XML functions) and DB2 XML Extender enhancements. Many relational database systems are not equipped to deal with XML documents. Programmers had to choose between using an XML based database management system, writing custom code to transform data between relational and XML forms, or storing XML documents in their entirety as binary objects thereby giving up the benefit of understanding the business context that XML documents represent. DB2 offers an alternative. It allows programmers to:
· Store XML documents intact with XML tags, yet provide fast search and retrieval by creating relational side tables and indexes, and
· Automatically transform XML documents into traditional relational representation (rows and columns in relational tables), and to automatically create XML documents from relational data.
Web Services: Web services are a powerful new paradigm in building open systems, enabling the development and deployment of loosely coupled applications within a company or across many enterprises. They are based on emerging industry standards including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
Web services can be easily created by wrapping existing applications, masking the underlying implementation and transport mechanisms. These newly created services are then publicized in a standard format registry, allowing people and applications to find and use the services over the Web. The published Web services can be combined in many ways, providing a building block approach to system development which leverages existing applications and infrastructure. DB2 supports Web services in a variety of ways. DB2 stored procedures or user-defined functions can be wrapped and invoked as Web services. Alternatively, DB2 applications can invoke Web services directly through SQL, allowing queries to join Web service results, like a current stock price, with data stored in the database.
Federation
DB2 is the core federation engine which provides data source transparency, rich query and transformation features for federated data sources, functional compensation, and global optimization for distributed data access. DB2 lets you access and update your DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) data sources no matter where they reside. DB2 Connect enables federation for zSeries(TM) and iSeries(TM) . Through its object-relational technology infrastructure, DB2 provides built-in functions that enable federated access to MQ Series message queues, and OLE DB data sources. Thus a single DB2 query can access and integrate data across relational databases, message queues, and OLE DB data sources.
With DB2 UDB V7, DB2 Relational Connect provides federated connectivity to Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase data bases and DB2 Life Sciences Data Connect provides federated connectivity to spreadsheets, flat files, XML documents and Life Science specific data sources. These features will not be offered directly with DB2 V8, but will be reintroduced in a subsequent announcement. In the interim, customers using either feature should remain on DB2 UDB V7.2 until IBM announces an upgrade path.
Replication
DB2 UDB V8.1 provides integrated replication among DB2 and IDS. DB2 DataPropagator enables replication to and from DB2 on zSeries and iSeries. DB2 V8.1 replication features improved usability, reliability, performance, serviceability, and security. The new DB2 Replication Center is a graphical tool, part of the DB2 Control Center, that helps you to set up and administer your replication environment. It supports administration for DB2-to-DB2 or IDS replication environments. It includes all the replication functionality previously available from the DB2 Control Center and the DB2 DataJoiner(R) Replication Administration (DJRA) tool. Use the Replication Center to:
· Define defaults in profiles for creating control tables, source objects, and target objects
· Create replication control tables
· Register replication sources
· Create subscription sets and add subscription-set members to subscription sets
· Operate the capture program
· Operate the apply program
· Monitor the replication process
Performance and Scalability
DB2 Universal Database provides high performance on everything from laptops supporting mobile users to massively parallel systems with terabytes of data or thousands of users. This allows you to minimize costs and maximize personnel skills by using a single database for all your application needs no matter what the scale.
Connection Concentrator: This DB2 V8.1 enhancement is beneficial in a transactional workload environment where each transaction is of relatively short duration and there is no requirement to use an external transaction manager such as Encina or Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). It reduces memory consumption on the database server and enhance performance by allowing transactions from a large number of remote clients to be concentrated or multiplexed across a small number of persistent database connections.
InfiniBand Support: DB2 is the first database to support InfiniBand fabric connectivity for high-speed interconnection. DB2 V8.1 includes improved support for the InfiniBand architecture to deploy partitioned databases on multiple servers while offering greater scalability and better performance.
Other performance and scalability enhancements includes:
· Improved performance of databases with multiple partitions
· Multidimensional data clustering (MDC)
· Prefetching enhancement
· Faster page cleaners
· User-maintained materialized query tables (MQTs), also known as Automatic Summary Tables (ASTs)
· Support for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux
· New and improved online utilities for loading data, index creation and table and index reorganization
· Dynamic configuration parameter update without needing to stop database activity
· Much faster tablespace roll forward recovery due to greatly improved log processing algorithms
· More robust log archiving that allows archiving of logs even while transactions are in flight and for log archiving to use parallel I/O.
Improved application performance and reduced client resource consumption due to the new client architecture. The new client architecture includes new implementations of ODBC/CLI, JDBC, and OLE DB drivers and new SQLJ support. These drivers have been rearchitected to minimize path lengths, copying of data from one place to another, and resource consumption.
Reliability and Availability
As more mission-critical applications are implemented on Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms, IBM's ability to bring mainframe-level reliability to this environment has become a major factor for customers choosing DB2.
Online Table Reorganization Utility: DB2 V8.1 supports online table reorganization that allows full access to the table being reorganized. In addition, online table reorganization can be paused and resumed later. A unique aspect of this online utility is that the table reorganization is done "in-place" without requiring additional storage while the utility is running. The offline reorganization utility will allow read-only applications to access the original copy of the table except during the last phases of the reorganization process. Both online and offline reorganizations have also been enhanced to improve support for partitioned databases.
Other availability enhancements includes:
· Online index reorganization utility
· Online configuration parameters
· Online buffer pool operations
· Online load
· Enhanced table space container operations
Multiplatform Support
DB2 Universal database is one of the most open database platforms available. It runs on the most popular UNIX(R) and Intel(R) server platforms, including AIX(R), HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows(R). It supports all major industry standards relevant to distributed data so that it can be accessed using thousands of existing tools and applications, and can be easily managed within an open network computing environment.
Security
DB2 Universal Database supports encryption and decryption of data stored on disk, using specially provided built-in SQL functions. DB2 Universal Database sets the standard for quality and reliability in the database industry.
Kerberos: DB2 V8.1 enhances customers ability to manage secure access to DB2 data by extending support for Kerberos, an industry standard authentication protocol. Previous versions of DB2 provided support for Windows Active Directory and Kerberos protocol to allow customers to implement single sign-on solutions in Windows 2000 and z/OS environments. The V8.1 extends this support to the UNIX and Linux platforms to provide secure single sign-on solution across all supported environments.
Application Development
DB2 Personal Developer's Edition V8.1 and DB2 Universal Developer's Edition V8.1 offer an extensive toolkit for building DB2 applications. These application development (AD) tools focus on maximizing programmer productivity by providing support for major application frameworks popular with both Java and Microsoft application programmers. DB2 V8.1 delivers significant enhancements that simplify application development.
The enhancements are offered in the following areas:
· SQL language enhancements
· Enhanced SQL Assist utility to simplify writing of SQL statements
· Enhanced facilities for developing user-defined functions
· Enhanced drivers for applications written to ADO, ODBC, OLE DB, DB2 CLI, JDBC, and SQLJ programming interfaces
· Enhanced support for XML
· Industry-leading Web Services support
· New Development Center
· New plug-ins for IBM WebSphere Studio integrated development environment
· New add-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio development products (VisualBasic, Visual C++, and InterDev)
· Additional complementary tools for Linux programmer are included in the DB2 Personal Developer's Edition V8 and DB2 Universal Developer's Edition products are a 30-day trial Borland CD, which contains - Borland Delphi Studio Architect,Borland C++Builder for Enterprise, and Borland Kylix Enterprise.
Development Center: Development Center is a replacement for the Stored Procedure Builder. It offers application developers facilities to build, debug, test and deploy Java and SQL stored procedures, SQL functions, and table functions that read MQSeries messages, access OLE DB data sources and extract data from XML documents.
New plug-ins: IBM WebSphere Studio plugins and Microsoft Visual Studio addins allow programmers using these integrated development environments (IDE) to build complete applications, including DB2 server business logic (stored procedures and user defined functions) without leaving the comfort of their favorite IDE.
