IBM and DB2

Analysis of IBM and various of its product lines in database management, analytics, and data integration.

November 7, 2008

Big scientific databases need to be stored somehow

A year ago, Mike Stonebraker observed that conventional DBMS don’t necessarily do a great job on scientific data, and further pointed out that different kinds of science might call for different data access methods. Even so, some of the largest databases around are scientific ones, and they have to be managed somehow. For example:

Long-term, I imagine that the most suitable DBMS for these purposes will be MPP systems with strong datatype extensibility — e.g., DB2, PostgreSQL-based Greenplum, PostgreSQL-based Aster nCluster, or maybe Oracle.

October 5, 2008

Schema flexibility and XML data management

Conor O’Mahony, marketing manager for IBM’s DB2 pureXML, talks a lot about one of my favorite hobbyhorses — schema flexibility — as a reason to use an XML data model. In a number of industries he sees use cases based around ongoing change in the information being managed:

Conor also thinks market evidence shows that XML’s schema flexibility is important for data interchange. Read more

October 5, 2008

Vertical market XML standards

Tracking the alphabet soup of vertical market XML standards is hard. So as a starting point, I’m splitting a list I got from IBM into a standalone post.

Among the most important or successful IBM pureXMLsupported standards, in terms of downloads and other evidence of customer interest, are: Read more

October 5, 2008

Overview of IBM DB2 pureXML

On August 29, I had a great call with IBM about DB2 pureXML (most of the IBM side of the talking was done by Conor O’Mahony and Qi Jin). I’m finally getting around to writing it up now. (The world of tabular data warehousing has kept me just a wee bit busy …)

As I write it, I see there are a considerable number of holes, but that’s the way it seems to go when researching XML storage. I’m also writing up a September call from which I finally figured out (I think) the essence of how MarkLogic Server works – but only after five months of trying. It turns out that MarkLogic works rather differently from DB2 pureXML. Not coincidentally, IBM and Mark Logic focus on rather different use cases for native XML storage.

What I understand so far about the basic DB2 pureXML architecture goes like this: Read more

September 13, 2008

Top DBMS on Linux

I was looking up George Crump’s blogs in connection with his recent post on SSDs, and I stumbled upon one that outlines at great length what features Linux backup systems should have. I won’t claim to have read it word for word, but what did catch my eye were a couple of comments on DBMS market share, which boiled down to:

  1. Oracle
  2. MySQL
  3. PostgreSQL

Read more

September 4, 2008

More data on data warehouse sizes and issues

I spoke today with Paul Barth and Randy Bean of consultancy NewVantage Partners. The core of NewVantage’s business seems to be helping large enterprises (especially financial services) with their data warehouse strategies. Takeaways — none of which should shock regular readers of DBMS2 — included:

July 24, 2008

Microsoft is buying DATAllegro

I’ve long argued that:

Microsoft has now validated my claim by agreeing to buy DATAllegro. As you probably know, we’ve been covering DATAllegro extensively, as per the links listed below.

Basic deal highlights include: Read more

June 28, 2008

Who is doing what in XML data management these days?

A comment thread to a post on a different subject has opened up a discussion of XML storage. Frankly, I haven’t kept up with my briefings on the subject, in part because XML support hasn’t proved to be very important yet to the big DBMS vendors, somewhat to my surprise. When last I looked, the situation wasn’t much different from what it was back in November, 2005. Unless I’ve missed something (and please tell me if I have!), here’s what’s going on: Read more

May 30, 2008

ANTs bails out of the DBMS market

ANTs Data Server — i.e., the ANTs DBMS — has been sold off to a company called 4Js. It is now to be called Genero DB. Actually, 4Js has been selling or working on a version of the product called Genero DB since 2006, specifically an Informix-compatible one.

I’m not totally clear on why an Informix-compatible DBMS is needed in a world that already has Informix SE, but maybe IBM is overcharging for maintenance even on the low-end version of the product.

Meanwhile, ANTs, which had originally tried to get enterprises to migrate away from Oracle, is now focused on middleware called the ANTs Compatibility Server to help them migrate to Oracle, specifically/initially from Sybase.

April 29, 2008

Truviso and EnterpriseDB blend event processing with ordinary database management

Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:

  • There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.

  • Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.

  • If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.

Read more

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