Foreword

There is justifiable excitement in today's technology world with topics such as Services Oriented Architectures, Open Source Development, Business Process Management, Radio Frequency Identification, Content Management, Regulatory Compliance or Data Warehousing. A technology that underpins all of those discussions is a topic near and dear to many of our hearts: database technology. In fact, databases play a bigger, more active role than ever.

Database technology was first introduced over 30 years ago with some simple objectives. Companies needed to abstract storage and retrieval of data to increase the productivity of their programmers and administrators and optimize the use of computing resources. Further, companies needed high levels of data integrity and reliability so they could entrust their transactional environments to computer automation. And, perhaps most importantly, companies needed to share information more effectively.

A continuum of advancements has allowed database technology make significant strides towards these objectives. But, while the basic objectives remain the same, the demands of business have raised the bar. Business demands have become global and the demands on data to be available 24 x 7 x 365. Business models must be flexible, allowing companies to quickly seize new opportunities. Costs relating to both computing resources and people must still be optimized.

So the challenge moves from having a database management system simply storing and retrieving data, to serving data in a networked, "always on, always available" world. Today's world demands a "data server." This is the driving concept behind DB2 9.

This means making data flow easily and dynamically to the applications, processes and people that need it, when they need it. It means supporting flexible architectures, like Services Oriented Architecture, optimizing support for new data types, like XML, and embracing new developer communities and development paradigms, like Ruby or PHP. It means integration with purchased application packages, like SAP. It means dynamically serving analytic insight from a warehouse in real time to the people who need it. It means all this and at the same time means optimizing the total cost of operations - from deep compression algorithms saving storage and processing costs, to increasing levels of automation to reduce skill levels and allow administrators to focus on high value tasks.

Like the last 30 years, the next 30 years will bring with it enormous change. Those years will also bring an incredible opportunity for information technology professionals and those who support data servers. Global businesses are based on information, and data server professionals will be the stewards of this critical corporate asset. I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity that Roger Sanders is providing to learn more about DB2. You'll be learning skills you can both leverage across many technology settings and use to deliver more value to your business. Your time will be well spent. Enjoy the experience.

Dr. Arvind Krishna
Vice President, IBM Data Servers and Worldwide Information Management Development