LinuxWorld: IBM’s DB2 Universal Database 7.1 for Linux shines

“A few installation kinks aside, IBM’s DB2 Universal
Database 7.1 for Linux impresses with its superior ease of use,
stability, and variety of tools.“

“IBM first ported its Universal Database to Linux in version
6.0, in the great 1998-1999 wave of commercial database ports that
also starred Oracle, Informix, Borland, and Sybase. In fact, DB2
for Linux was originally to be available at no charge, and it only
became payware after IBM noticed high demand from corporate
customers. Big Blue has followed through with Linux versions of
each subsequent release. Promising the full panolpy of enterprise
database features, from a robust ANSI SQL-92 core to Object
Database (if not yet SQL-99) extensions to administration, network,
performance tuning, and replication tools, to extenders for
geospacial systems, XML, hard-core financial number-crunching, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I downloaded IBM DB2 personal edition from the source. There
was an option to order a CD, but the last time I ordered a DB2 CD
from IBM (UDB 6.2), delivery took over two months, and I wanted to
have a look this year. Besides, linuxpecmn.tar was a pretty
modest-sized download (relative to its peers) at 75 MB. You might
be wondering why IBM doesn’t gzip it as well, but it turns out that
most of the archive contents are RPMs, which already compress their
contents.”

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