IBM Promises New DB2 Will Take Better Care Of Itself

IBM will begin shipping the next release of its DB2 Universal Database Sept. 17, the company said Thursday. Known by the code name Stinger, DB2 UDB 8.2 promises customers expanded self-managing or "autonomic computing" capabilities, extended Linux support, and geospatial technology inherited through IBM's 2001 Informix Corp. acquisition.

Self-managing features are critical because of databases' spiraling growth, making them more difficult--and expensive--for database administrators to handle, says Jeff Jones, strategy director for IBM's data-management division. IBM says the new autonomic features can reduce time spent on administrative tasks by up to 65%. For example, the new release offers a feature called Design Advisor that recommends the best way to partition data to speed processing. Design Advisor also automatically tunes the database as its workload fluctuates, changing its structure and backup-and-restore tasks as needed.

The Credit Union of Texas operates a data warehouse on DB2 UDB 8.1, and business-intelligence director Bruce Moore says Design Advisor will help him manage the database's large tables--some with dozens of indexes used to retrieve columns of data when running queries. Those indexes are rebuilt each month when information is loaded into the data warehouse, a job that takes five hours.

"I'm sure some of those indexes are redundant, but I'm not sure which ones," Moore says. Using Design Advisor's summary table and multidimensional clustering capabilities, "We think we can get rid of a bunch of those indexes and reduce our build time," he says. That would speed up the generation of reports about customer accounts and fraud detection used by bank employees. Moore expects to have the new release in production by the end of the year.

The database also has new query-optimization tools, which automatically update statistics about how the database is being used and then uses those metrics to adjust the database's performance. The new autonomic object-maintenance feature automatically handles administration and maintenance functions such as making adjustments to database tables and running data back-ups.

DB2 UDB 8.2 will run faster on clusters of Linux servers through its support for version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, IBM says. And the new geodetic extender feature supports three-dimensional geospatial data and understands concepts such as time zones and the international date line. That makes it easier to develop complex software for applications such as land management that use geographical and time-based data.

Pricing starts at $25,000 for DB2 UDB 8.2 Enterprise Edition.