IBM may open source DB2
Summary
Topics
While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open-source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's UK director of information management software.
"We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core [DB2] technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open-source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space as a whole. As the future unfolds and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."
DB2 is widely used in IBM products globally. Livesey said that next steps for the 25-year-old product include improving the interaction capabilities between DB2 and business intelligence (BI) products so queries can be managed in one place.
"People with detailed queries currently extract the data [from DB2 databases] to use with BI," said Livesey. "They don't do it in the database itself because the [performance of the] database would be hit very hard."
Customers increasingly have the desire to look for business analytics in one place and in real-time, said Livesey, which meant IBM had had to focus on maintaining the speed of DB2 transactions while enabling complex queries in the same environment.
Current challenges faced by IT professionals tasked with managing data include the size and scale of data stores, said Livesey. "There's a huge data explosion which is increasing by orders of magnitude each year, which is having a major impact on storage and the guardians of data," said Livesey. "Look at the amount of information produced on the planet, and the number of people trying to access it. We don't know when things are going to fall over."
As a consequence, Livesey said that IBM was also researching data compression technology, and privacy and security measures to safeguard data.
Talkback Most Recent of 2 Talkback(s)
-
Open source
Where poorly executed proprietary solutions go to linger way past their time...
ejhonda16th Jun 2008 -
DB2 Free Version = DB2 Buggy Version
"We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core [DB2] technology," said Livesey.
I wish Livesey would be more accurate in his statement. Unfortunately, the light version is DB2-Express C (free edition) which does not have fixpacks and cannot be updated with fixpacks. This version is only good for stand alone developers. In essence, a buggy compiled version of the DB2 product which IBM tries to push out there as a "free" version. Nice try IBM. I cannot see corporate or software engineering firms wasting their staff time with a buggy edition of a product to which fixpacks cannot be applied. (I'm sure they exist).
In the open source arena, Sun + MySQL is giving IBM a run for its money. For those of us who remember the 90s when IBM was proclaiming that MVCC was of no merit or scale up versus scale out was the way to go. IBM has tried to implement a poor mans version of MVCC in DB2 9.5. Sun brings hardware, virtualization, and multiple OS support to the table, along with a hard learned mistakes learned in working with Open Source.
For web based applications, I bet my money on Sun+MySQL. For inhouse workgroup and departmental applications, it is Microsoft SQL Server all the way, For inhouse enterprise applications, it is Oracle by far.
DB2 for the most part is getting irrelevant., just like Websphere and Rational. There are pockets of adoption of DB2 and Websphere but nothing to hinge your career on.
johnbrown36200317th Jun 2008
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
