IBM To Ship New DB2

IBM said its new DB2 9 database, aka Viper, will ship in late July on all major platforms.

The new database will be available for Linux, Windows and Unix in the same SKUs as the current DB2 8.2 release, with a slight price increase. The prices of various database add-ons has risen slightly, IBM said.

The Enterprise Edition will list for $36,400 per CPU, or $938 per named user. The WorkGroup Edition will cost $10,000 per CPU, or $350 per named user, and the Express Edition will run $4,874 per CPU, or $165 per named user. The prices include a year of maintenance, and user pricing assumes at least 25 users.

IBM executives have long characterized the Viper release as a database breakthrough, in that it handles, stores, manages and accesses relational and XML data in the same database.

"We created an optimized storage manager for how XML data should be laid out on disk,” said Bob Picciano, vice president of worldwide sales for IBM information management. “Whether it is striped across or stored at center, it understands where indexes need to be placed and utilizes our Starburst optimizer. That lets us use the same canonical format to represent parsed language of XML the same way we do for relational."Picciano touted new "autonomic" perks to ease management and operations. "Today, DBAs have to look at queues to determine when to do backup and recover and organization of tables. Now DB2 autonomics alert the DBA when this has to happen and can automatically do those things," he said.

He also pointed to automatic optimization of queries at runtime, which speeds performance even if there's been a change in environment.

IBM has already talked about new "Venom" storage technology and security enhancements in the Viper release.