IBM to release near-ready DB2 Viper database
Looking to unseat Oracle, Big Blue to provide a release candidate of DB2 Viper, generally available by midyear.
The company plans to offer the DB2 Viper "test drive" as a free download to customers on
Thursday. Also, at an event in Jaipur, India,
Bob Picciano, vice president of data servers at IBM, said the latest release is the equivalent of a "release candidate," the industry term for a product that's close to being fully developed and tested. The generally available product is scheduled for completion in the early summer, he said.
The most significant feature to be added in the
The company has added a separate storage mechanism for XML to DB2. The mechanism keeps the document structure intact rather than reformatting it for a relational system. DB2 Viper's "hierarchical" storage format and XML-specific indexing will greatly improve performance for applications that use XML data, Picciano said.
"Viper is really aimed at taking (Oracle) out of the market," he said, noting that about 40 percent of the world's data is in an XML format. "This will allow us to take a big chunk out of the market standing."
On Thursday, IBM is expected to disclose enhanced security features that will give customers more control over access policies.
Goyal will also discuss compression technology that can reduce the amount of storage needed by 55 percent to 60 percent, Picciano said.
Picciano added that the company's recently released