IBM has at last given some idea of how it plans to prevent users locked into its venerable IMS hierachical database management system from being locked out of the brave new world of the relational DB2 database manager – although, as might be expected, it is a case of promises, promises, with no timescale for the promised offerings. The company plans facilities to enable IMS users to create applications that will co-exist with DB2 applications and enable the latter to be updated with data from an IMS database, either automatically and synchronously, or in batch. The bridge will initially cover only specified fields of data, not the whole database, and IBM envisages the two coexisting for many years. It does have a full IMS-to-DB2 conversion facility, DXT, but this converts only the database and not the applications, which have to be rewritten for DB2. The information was given in a briefing at IBM’s Santa Teresa Laboratory in San Jose and IBM hinted that further out, it planned similar links between DB2 and other non-Systems Application Architecture databases, principally the relational database planned for the AIX version of Unix, and perhaps to non IBM databases. And limited facilities for linking distributed DB2 databases announced last October are to be extended to embrace the OS/2 Extended Edition database manager and SQL/DS as well as DB2; there are no dates.
