IBM to open-source DB2?

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 database management software under an open-source license.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open-source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's U.K. director of information management software.

"We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open-source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

DB2 is widely used in IBM products globally. Livesey said next steps for the 25-year-old product include improving the interaction capabilities between DB2 and business intelligence (BI) products so queries can be managed in one place.

"People with detailed queries currently extract the data (from DB2 databases) to use with BI," Livesey said. "They don't do it in the database itself because the (performance of the) database would be hit very hard."

Customers increasingly have the desire to look for business analytics in one place and in real time, said Livesey, which means that IBM had to focus on maintaining the speed of DB2 transactions while enabling complex queries in the same environment.

Current challenges faced by IT professionals tasked with managing data include the size and scale of data stores, Livesey said.

"There's a huge data explosion which is increasing by orders of magnitude each year, which is having a major impact on storage and the guardians of data," Livesey said.

"Look at the amount of information produced on the planet and the number of people trying to access it. We don't know when things are going to fall over."

As a consequence, Livesey said IBM was also researching data compression technology, and privacy and security measures to safeguard data.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[Commander_Spock]

Re: ""People with detailed queries currently extract the data (from DB2 databases) to use with BI," Livesey said. "They don't do it in the database itself because the (performance of the) database would be hit very hard."

Customers increasingly have the desire to look for business analytics in one place and in real time, said Livesey, which means that IBM had to focus on maintaining the speed of DB2 transactions while enabling complex queries in the same environment.

Current challenges faced by IT professionals tasked with managing data include the size and scale of data stores, Livesey said...." It takes "two" to tango - Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA). :-D

[sal-magnone]

"They don't do it in the database itself because the (performance of the) database would be hit very hard." - Welcome to the database business. I'm suprised IBM didn't build a sucessfull solution ala MS Analysis and Reporting Services. Didn't they buy somthing or someone for this?

[Commander_Spock]

Re: "They don't do it in the database itself because the (performance of the) database would be hit very hard." - Welcome to the database business. I'm suprised IBM didn't build a successful solution ala MS Analysis and Reporting Services. Didn't they buy something or someone for this?" Well, who ever said that IBM Business Partners do not have such solutions that you are talking about? And; then again, Are you not forgetting this one - "MONITORING SERVICES" that needed to be added to "Analysis and Reporting Services".

[scdecade]

The idea of trying to optimize a database to handle both transactions as well as BI is dumb. At best this is a fool's quest.

What's with IBM lately? All they seem to be doing is copying Sun's strategy. Open sourcing their proprietary applications and building data centers in cargo containers...

[jamshid]

Please, let DB2 die. Like AIX, it's overcomplicated bloatware that had its day but simpler solutions are available now. IBM is willing to give away their software and code as open source because they make billions off consulting and support. Open source doesn't change that model.

[dargon19888]

Who is the person being interviewed? A BUE out of the UK? Like he's in the know.... NOT!

The truth is that IBM had integrated OLAP and meta cube features in to DB2 back in version 8. There's your BI.

As to reporting well some people want a tool that is database agnostic so that it can be used against all of their databases.

The bottom line... This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Or the reporter got it wrong. Like that *never* happens.

[katsnelson]

Not sure if Chris Livesey was misquoted. DB2 Express-C, the free DBMS, is not "light" database at least not if "light" is the description of the function. DB2 Express-C (http://freeDB2.com) is "full function" product that is offered using the "open source business model" but it is not open source.
On the "light" point ... DB2 Express-C has ALL of the function of the other DB2 editions. Actually it includes some additional functions such as pureXML and all of it absolutely free. Also, it is free not just for development or use internally but DB2 Express-C can be included in commercial products at no charge.
On the subject of "open source". DB2 is not open source and many of our customers appreciate this fact because their procurement processes prevent them from acquiring open source products due to intellectual property concerns. The other often voiced concern is lack of a "single throat to choke" i.e. commercially available support. This is why DB2 Express-C implements "open source business model" i.e. while the product is free it is available with optional low cost support that is delivered by IBM (not third parties). The cost of this optional support is the same as what MySQL charges for a similar offering ($2995/server/year). More information at http://www.ibm.com/db2/express.

Leon Katsnelson
Program Director, IBM Data Management

[johnbrown362003]

When you have the Program Director of DB2 adding more misinformation to Livesey comments, you just have to wonder how difficult was it for IBM to recruit qualified Program Directors for their software products. Mr Leon's statement about open and Intellectual Property concerns dovetail with those of Microsoft. I bet the Microsoft folks are ROTFL.

Unfortunately, the light version is DB2-Express C (free edition) which does not have fixpacks and cannot be updated with fixpacks. This version is only good for stand alone developers. In essence, a buggy compiled version of the DB2 product which IBM tries to push out there as a "free" version. Nice try IBM. I cannot see corporate or software engineering firms wasting their staff time with a buggy edition of a product to which fixpacks cannot be applied. (I'm sure they exist).

Sure its a "full function product" but if you need to apply fixpacks you need to buy support , which is not trivial and IBM's done a lot of quick talking about this one. IBM's strategy is to use a lot of wording throwing in the "Free" but carefully omitting the paid subscription support phrases.

And the DB2 Express-C "Paid" version counts the number of processor cores (limit of 4 cores) and limit of total of 4 GB of memory. MySQL paid version does not limit memory or number of processor cores. So Mr Leon's statement about the equivalence or similarity of IBM's offering to MySQL's offering is inaccurate.

In the open source arena, Sun + MySQL is giving IBM a run for its money. For those of us who remember the 90s when IBM was proclaiming that MVCC was of no merit or scale up versus scale out was the way to go. IBM has tried to implement a poor mans version of MVCC in DB2 9.5. Sun brings hardware, virtualization, and multiple OS support to the table, along with a hard learned mistakes learned in working with Open Source.

For web based applications, I bet my money on Sun+MySQL. For inhouse workgroup and departmental applications, it is Microsoft SQL Server all the way, For inhouse enterprise applications, it is Oracle by far.

DB2 for the most part is getting irrelevant, just like Websphere and Rational. There are pockets of adoption of DB2 and Websphere but nothing to hinge your career on.

[gggg sssss]

MS SQL server express is free, includes fixes, ties into all MS development environments, and did I mention it is free?

Only down side is it only runs on MS operating systems, and not on NT at that.

[katsnelson]

Ouch, without knowing much about me, even without getting my name right, you just called me incompetent. Since you started with ?open? let?s compare our track records. I post openly using my real name and indicate my position and the company I work for in my profile. You Mr. John Brown (why not call yourself 007?) hide behind anonymous handle johnbrown362003 with zero information in your profile. I smell a troll.
Let me respond to FixPacks. We do not update the free version of DB2 Express-C with FixPacks, we issue new releases and we do it quite frequently. Since we launched DB2 Express-C 8.2 in February 2006 we had two major releases of the DB2 Express-C (v9.1 and 9.5) and we shipped them on the very same day as all of the paid versions of DB2 and on all supported platforms in 27 national languages. This is in addition to 4 separate beta programs that we ran during this time. Meanwhile, Oracle XE has not had a single new shipment of any kind. That is despite the fact that there are several dozen known security vulnerabilities in the Oracle 10g R2. Same is true for Microsoft. There have been no new releases since Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005. Oh, you are going to claim that open source databases are different, they have something like fixpacks. Well, I don?t know of any that do. Here is what MySQL website (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads) says on this topic:
?In contrast to the MySQL Enterprise Server, which receives both monthly rapid updates and quarterly service pack releases, there is no specific schedule for when a new version of the MySQL Community Server is released.?
Hey, that is exactly what we do ? provide regular frequent FixPacks with the optional low cost paid subscription and provide the community that uses the free version of DB2 Express-C with a roll up of all of the fixes in the subsequent release. You have to at least try to check your facts troll number johnbrown362003 before you call someone incompetent.
OK, let?s move to ?buggy?. Every piece of software ever produced has bugs. DB2 Express-C is bit for bit, byte for byte identical to DB2 Enterprise which consistently earns the reputation of one of the highest quality products out there. It is the software that is used to run world?s largest companies in banking, insurance, transportation and pretty much every other sphere of commerce that you use every day. Obviously the rest of the world sees it is a appropriate to run their most critical systems and not just do development. Since you seem to be fond of MySQL, let?s look at MySQL quality. First of all, I happen to like MySQL and I like the passion and drive of the team behind it. However, quality is not by any means the hallmark of MySQL. Listen to Monty Widenius (founder of MySQL) openly state that ?MySQL are constantly shipping releases before they are ready? and that ?Critical bugs are still open in 5.1 and not scheduled to be fixed before GA?. And there is much more on page 19 of Monty?s presentation at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2575733/The-future-of-MySQL-The-Project. I heard him talk about quality issues at both MySQL User Conference and last week at OSCON.
Last but not least, you pretty much wrote all of IBM software off as irrelevant. According to you MySQL+SUN are just runaway success as is Microsoft and Oracle and IBM is just in the toilet. Don?t know where you get your facts. I suspect facts is not something that you really concern yourself with. I happen to like Sun and MySQL but both are far from success at this point in time. Sun is in a huge financial struggle and has seen its market value drop to $7.29B and that is after absorbing $1B in MySQL acquisition. IBM on the other hand posted yet again one of the strongest quarters ever and, in case you are wondering, Data Management grew 30%. So, if DB2 is irrelevant it is very strange that it is second largest in market share and keeps growing at these rates. Hey, but I am sure your numbers are more grounded in reality than those of reported by IBM an SUN. Oh, and WebSphere by the way is the number 1 web application server with market share almost twice that if its nearest competitor. Recently Gartner ranked Rational as the leader in the world wide market for application development tools (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/sdsd73qvuj?OpenDocument&site=Software&s_cmp=rssnews).
Mr. anonymous johnbrown362003, I am game for a good argument based on facts. However, I am not very appreciative of some John full of Brown stuff troll calling me incompetent. At the very least, make an attempt appear factual before you slander someone who actually has the facts.