As well as the new DB2/6000 relational database for the RS/6000 described on Monday (CI No 2,128), IBM Corp yesterday duly announced DB2 Version 3 for the mainframe – but the thing will only go into customer testing under the Quality Partnership Programme in June, and availability and ordering information will not be given until that process is complete. The new release is designed to enhance availability and faster faster recovery with support of partition independence and data compression and there are new multi-site update capabilities for use in client-server environments using Distributed Relational Database Architecture. Query performance is enhanced by support of query input-output parallelism. Buffer management enhancements and hiperpool support are designed to enable customers to make better use of large processor storage as a means of reducing input-output calls and improve DB2 performance. DB2 Version 3 will support the DRDA extension for the two-phase commit protocol, which manages commit for multiple relational database systems in a single unit of work, enabling IMS/ESA Transaction Manager, IMS batch and CICS applications to update remote databases. It will also support the DRDA new machine type extensions that enable application requestors on Digital Equipment Corp floating point systems and Unix systems to request database services from DB2. DB2 Version 3 will enable users to work on one partition of a table space or index space without locking the other partitions. Partitions are independent of each other. A DB2 Version 3 server can support 10,000 distributed connections but only 2,000 of those can be active concurrently. The new DB2 will support the use of Data Propagator Release 2, which automatically updates IMS/ESA Database Manager or DB2 data when corresponding information in the other database management system is updated. As for pricing on the new DB2/6000, this is tied to the number of concurrent use connections, and starts at $2,000 for up to two users on a baby RS/6000 to $57,600 for over 256 users on a top-end machine.
