UDB Technology Fully Extended to AS/400
V4R4 of OS/400, available May 21, will bring enhancements to the AS/400's DB2/400 database that will bring it into parity with IBM's industry-leading DB2 Universal Database [UDB]. Reflecting this new parity, the AS/400 database will officially be known as DB2 Universal Database for AS/400 as of the May 21 OS release.
"1998 was a year of performance and scalability improvements [for DB2/400]," says Van Symons, IBM's AS/400 Division Global Business Intelligence segment manager. "1999 will be a year of functional improvements."Symons emphasizes that DB2 UDB for AS/400 will not share a common code base with DB2 UDB on other platforms [Unix, Windows NT, MVS, etc.], but will be consistent in function with the IBM database on those platforms.DB2/400 already had much of the function of DB2 UDB with the exception of unstructured data types like compound documents, spreadsheets and multimedia objects. But improvements have been made across DB2/400 to bring it up to UDB standards.
Universal access has been improved with support for JDBC and SQLJ and full support for Java clients. Universal application has been improved with the addition of Web-based data warehousing tools and and full Java application server support. Universal scalability has been enhanced with improved encoded vector index [introduced in V4R3] support. Universal reliability has been improved thanks to continuous availability offerings and improved backup and recovery capability.
And universal management has been improved with the addition of Operations Navigator for graphical database facilities; DBA Essentials for administration; and logical partitioning (LPAR) to allow for multiple data mart servers and data warehouse and OLTP application isolation on the same system.
-D. Callaghan
See the Feb. 9 MIDRANGE Systems for complete coverage of the V4R4 announcement