IBM has announced version 9.7 of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, focused on transactional performance improvements in the DB2 database, and on expansion of analytics to XML data in the InfoSphere Data Warehouse. Both new products also reduce an even greater amount of space needed to store data, helping clients to gain significant savings on related costs including energy. This offering is also the industry's first database software that will deliver business analytics capabilities for both relational and XML data at the same time, according to IBM.
InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 Enterprise Edition, powered by DB2 9.7, also includes tools to simplify data analysis and data mining, as well as a new Departmental Edition of the software, targeted for smaller organizations and departments within a larger organization. The software also includes workload management and autonomic computing features that improve the performance of high priority applications such as closing quarterly financial reports and helping IT staff more efficiently manage their growing data.
Bernie Spang, director of IBM data servers, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "the volume of XML data is growing, and so is the importance of generating new intelligence from this valuable XML data. Examples of this data are forms, messages using web services standards, financial interchange information, electronic sales receipts, and electronic patient records. Using this last category of patient records as an example, the new DB2 9.7 product would update individual patient records in the database with new transactions, and the new InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 product could perform analytics across multiple patient records for deeper medical insight."
IBM's Integrated Data Management approach is intended to help improve developer productivity. DB2 9.7 includes new technology that makes it easier for IT professionals to quickly develop and deploy applications, including ones written specifically to operate on other database software. Now, developers can take advantage of these new technologies using the IBM Data Studio to design, develop, deploy and manage information throughout its entire lifecycle. DB2 9.7 and InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 will be available in June. Customers, developers and partners can test drive DB2 9.7 by taking advantage of IBM's Early Access Program. For more information on DB2 9.7, go here. For more information on InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7, go here.