DB2 9.7 FP4 is out: Trigger support has been enhanced and some other goodies

A new fixpack 4 is now available for DB2 9.7. An overview of new features and enhancements is on the Information Center. Many of the enhancements are designed to make migration from other database systems, namely Oracle, simpler, saving even more on migration costs.

What stands out from my perspective, are the enhancements to the trigger functionality. Now you can lump the definition of update, delete, and insert triggers together into a single DDL statement. Speaking of statement, support for statement triggers that fire only once per execution has been added to DB2's PL/SQL functionality, too.

Many of you will like (pun intended!) a new LIKE feature. It is now possible to use a column reference as pattern expression, i.e., to look up the actual pattern in a different table.

Note that the fixpack has already been upload and the Information Center been updated. However, it seems that the fix list overview page and the fixpack summary page still need to be updated.

New IBM Redpaper: Highly Available and Scalable Systems with IBM eX5 and DB2 pureScale

A new IBM Redpaper discussing DB2 pureScale on System x eX5 machines has been published this week. The paper has a high-level introduction to pureScale and its benefits and talks about the situation at a specific customer. It's not that deeply technical, but a good introduction and with some links to more resources.

My resource page has been updated

I keep a DB2 and pureXML Resources page as part of this blog. I added some more links and will continue with this as I find time.

Pure and free: Test pureXML on pureScale

You probably already know that there is a feature for XML data processing in DB2 which is called pureXML. You also know there is a continuous availability and scale-out feature for DB2 called pureScale. And I won't talk about pureQuery today. But did you know that pureXML is supported on pureScale? Did you know that you can request access to the so-called pureScale Acceleration Kits and try it out yourself (for free)?

I recently was instructor for a pureScale Workshop and one of the attending companies reported that they built their own small pureScale system. Such a mini system - we often refer to them as nanoClusters (or here) - has all the features of a real cluster, but only costs few hundred dollars/Euros in hardware and you have your own pureScale system. If you want to "go high-end", you could request a proof of concept/proof of technology at one of the IBM locations. But in either case, test drive  pureXML on pureScale...