DB2 Express-C Team Blog

New event coming up:

DB2 Chat with the Lab
Wednesday May 6, 2009,
11:30 AM Eastern / 10:30 AM Central / 8:30 AM Pacific /
4:30 PM London / 5:30 PM Munich

DB2 9.7 Overview

IBM recently announced that DB2 9.7, the next release of DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, will be available in June 2009. This release of DB2 contains new features to:
- Reduce storage-related costs for data
- Improve database administrator productivity
- Improve developer productivity, and accelerate application development
- Improve business decision making with simplified analytics and end-to-end support for XML documents
- Reduce the expense of deploying and supporting departmental warehousing and analytic solutions

Join, Sal Vella, VP of Development, and Tim Vincent, Chief DB2 LUW Architect, to learn more about what's new in DB2 9.7, and get your questions answered.

To attend this session and receive the call-in telephone numbers and further instructions, kindly RSVP using the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/DB297overview

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Team

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

DB2 9.5 just set a new industry record on the TPC-C benchmark of online transaction processing (OLTP) performance, running on an IBM server powered by standard x86-64 Intel Xeon processors. This is the first time that a database running on an Intel or AMD x86-64 system has ever broken the 1 million tpmC barrier. DB2 has exceeded that barrier by over 20%.

DB2 also broke new ground in the price/performance category, being the first database software to come in lower than $2 USD/tpmC.

The free DB2 Express-C database is built on the same codebase as this record-breaking edition of DB2.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Team

Hello,

We have just put up some DB2 features overview pages:

- DB2 Autonomics
- DB2 Security
- DB2 Compression

For those who are still using DB2 8.2, it's time to upgrade!. The end of support for DB2 8.2 is April 30, 2009. Visit this page for details!

Raul.

We just released a small refresh of the DB2 Express-C 9.5.2 images for Linux 32-bit and Linux 64-bit. If you encountered any difficulties upgrading to v9.5.2 on Linux, you may want to download the latest:

• Download DB2 Express-C for Linux 32-bit (x86)
• Download DB2 Express-C for Linux 64-bit (x86_64)

These resolve a few things that cropped up around the upgrade process from v9.5 to v9.5.2 on Linux. Everything else is the same as in the initial v9.5.2 release, and the other platforms are unchanged.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Team

Since its release in 2007, Getting Started with DB2 Express-C has been a fantastically popular book. It has been freely downloaded over 35,000 times, and it's been translated by volunteers into nine world languages.

The second Portuguese translation is now available.

The book is ideal for developers, consultants, ISVs, DBAs, students, or anyone else who wants to get started with DB2. While this book is focused on DB2 Express-C, the no-charge edition of DB2, the concepts and content are equally applicable to other DB2 editions on Linux, UNIX, and Windows.

Translations of Getting Started with DB2 Express-C are available in Chinese, German, English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Team