"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.
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