DB2 9.7 announced, set for June release

IBM just announced DB2 9.7, filled with oodles of great new features. It is set to become generally available in June. There's an overview site, which largely focuses on the many cost savings in self-optimization, self-healing, compression, development, and performance.

Naturally, there are also many new developer and DBA focused features such as:
- Improved locking for better concurrency
- Ability to recompile statements without parameter markers
- Ability to re-use old access plans across fixpack updates
- More functions for string and date manipulation
- New data types such as NUMBER, VARCHAR2, etc.
- Easier casting between data types
- Default parameter values and assignment of parameter values by name
- Boolean, cursor, row and array data type support in procedures
- ROWNUM and ROWID
- Better Python support for DB2

There will be a DB2 9.7 Overview webcast in the Chat with the Lab series on May 6, 11:30 AM EST. It's a great opportunity to ask questions and find out the technical nitty-gritty.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Team