Introduction to IBM DB2

DB2 is product of universal database family of IBM consisting of flagship database servers and suites of related product for business, intelligence, information integration and content management. The DB2 is universal database server that can be use on variety of hardware and any of the operating system. There is even a no-charge (free) version of DB2 called DB2 Express-C. Applications can migrate seamlessly from low-end platforms to high-End platform servers because of portability of DB2 interface and services.

The first DB2 product was released in 1984 on the IBM mainframe platform.

The DB2 database engine consists of four code base type:

1. Linux, UNIX, and Windows

2. z/OS

3. VM

4. OS/400

All of these support the common subset of data-definition language, SQL, and administration interfaces.

The latest version of DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and windows as of 2009 is version 9.7.

The DB2 version 9.7 includes several new features such as:

1. Extension of Native Support for XML to shared nothing Environments,

2. Native compression for table and indexes, automatic storage management

3. Improved support for procedural language such as SQL PL and ORACLE PL/SQL.

The DB2 family consists of other products that provide tooling, administration, replication, distributed data access, pervasive data access, OLAP, and many other features.

Table 1 DB2 family of product

 

Database Servers	Database Management Tool	Application Development
-DB2 USD for Linux, Unix, Windows	-DB2 Control Center	-IBM Relation Application
-DB2 USD for z/OS	-DB2 Admin Tool for z/OS	-Developer Studio
- DB2 USD for OS/400	-DB2 Performance Expert	-DB2 Forms For z/OS
DB2 USD for  VM/VSE	-DB2 Query Patroller	-QMF

 -Mahindra Shingade