May 5, 2007

IBM’s mid-range OLTP offering gets strengthened

In the past, when I’ve asked Jeff Jones of IBM for permission to post one of his well-written notes, his response has pretty much been “Of course! Why did you bother asking?” So this time I’m just going ahead and skipping that step. The note is about IBM’s mid-range flavor of DB2, targeted directly at MySQL.

Today, IBM announced that its popular DB2 9 Express-C software is now available with an optional low-cost yearly support subscription. DB2 Express-C has been available without license charges for downloading, application development, deployment and redistribution since January 2006. It remains available without license charges for those that do not require support. Electronic general availability of the new support option is scheduled for June 1, 2007.

The new DB2 Express-C support option provides 24×7 product support, regular fixpacks and upgrade protection. In addition, this option provides support for high availability clustering, offsite disaster recovery, and data replication with remote data servers without additional charge.

Background

— Subscriptions are priced at $2,995 (U.S.) per server per year. This is identical to MySQL Enterprise Gold, but DB2 Express-C includes features not found in MySQL including pureXML support, high availability clustering (MySQL Cluster support costs extra), autonomic features, and no-charge administration and development tools. Unlike the free offerings from Microsoft and Oracle, DB2 Express-C does not place limits on the size or number of databases managed. With up to 4 GB of memory and up to 2 processors, DB2 Express-C can run on more powerful servers, can scale higher and can perform faster than its competitors.

— DB2 Express-C runs on Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) including Vista, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux on POWER (on either IBM System p or System i server partitions). DB2 Express-C is the same codebase as DB2 Workgroup Server Edition and DB2 Enterprise Server Edition for Linux, UNIX and Windows.

— Free DIY help and community-based assistance remains available through an online forum for those not purchasing the new support option.

— DB2 Express-C is included with the following Linux distributions: Novell’s Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise (ISSLE), Mandriva, and via automated download and installation from Ubuntu. For PHP developers, DB2 Express-C ships with Zend Core for IBM.

For More Information

1. The home page for DB2 Express-C:
http://ibm.com/software/data/db2/express

2. More information on the new DB2 Express-C support option:
http://ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/support.html

3. The overall home page for DB2:
http://ibm.com/db2

Regards,
Jeff Jones, Analyst Relations
IBM Information Management Software, IBM Software Group

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