| DB2 V6 has been generally available since June 1999. The most important new features provided by V6 are listed in the following sections. Database Administration Features 16-terabyte tables. Object/relational capabilities including BLOB s, CLOB s, and DBCLOB s, triggers, UDFs, and UDTs. Multimedia support with DB2 Extenders. 8K and 16K tablespace page sizes. VARCHAR column resizing. Explicit CREATE support for stored procedures. Ability to specify a default buffer pool for indexes. Enhanced support for pattern-matching characters in DB2 commands. Improved partition rebalancing. You can change checkpoint frequency dynamically using the SET LOG command. Object code version of DSNTEP2 provided (no longer need a PL/I compiler). Utility Features COPY and RECOVER can process a list of objects in parallel and recover indexes and tablespaces at the same time from image copies and the log. Parallel index build reduces the elapsed time of LOAD and REORG jobs involving more than one index. Inline statistics collection during utility jobs. Threshold limits to determine when to run REORG . Remote site recovery improvements. Programming Features SQLJ support for embedded SQL in Java programs. Three-part names support using DRDA. Many stored procedure enhancements, including nested procedure CALL s and the ability to issue CALL statements dynamically using ODBC drivers. More than 50 new built-in functions. Up to 225 tables permitted in SQL SELECT , INSERT , UPDATE , and DELETE statements and views. Support for VALUES and VALUES INTO . Direct-row access using the ROWID data type to re-access a row directly without using the index or scanning the table. ODBC extensions including new and modified APIs, support for DB2 V6 object/relational extensions, and ODBC catalog query redirection to shadow copies of DB2 catalog tables. Performance Features Optimization hints. Predictive governing . Statement cost estimation. Buffer pools in data spaces. DDF connection pooling. Improved workload balancing in parallel Sysplex. Faster log apply process. Ability to postpone backout work during a restart. Increased log output buffer size (from 1000 to 100000 4K buffers). Query parallelism improvements. DB2 Catalog Impact 9 new tables. 1 table no longer used, but kept for fallback purposes. 24 tables have one or more new or changed columns . 52 total new columns. 80 total revised columns. | 