Packaging and Naming Issues

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The actual name of the DB2 edition can be tricky to master on non-mainframe platforms. On the mainframe you just say "I want DB2," and that is what you get. Well, almost. You also have to decide whether you want IBM's utilities or not, too. But things are more difficult in the LUW world. The following packages are all available for DB2 on Linux, Unix, and Windows.

DB2 Workgroup Server Edition (WSE) is a multi- user , single host, Web-enabled database with included Java support, but without support for inter- or intra-partition parallelism. WSE fits most closely into the departmental DBMS architecture. It should be used for small systems with a limited number of users. WSE has a registration limit of a maximum of four processors.

DB2 Workgroup Server Unlimited Edition (WSUE) has the same functionality, and the same registration limit of a maximum four processors, but a different pricing model. So WSUE seems to fall somewhere between a departmental and an enterprise DBMS architecture ”for larger numbers of users than WSE.

DB2 UDB Enterprise Server Edition (ESE) is the highest level of DB2 database version with intra-partition parallelism support (the database engine can process SQL statement segments in parallel), and inter-partition parallelism support (process a query in parallel across all of the nodes). ESE has Partitioning and Clustering options as additional add-on features. So, this is the enterprise DB2. This is what used to be known as EEE, sort of.

DB2 UDB Personal Edition (PE) is a single-user database engine ideal for deployment to PC based users. PE is IBM's personal architecture DBMS offering.

DB2 UDB Developer's Edition (DE) is a low cost package for a single application developer to design, build, and prototype applications for deployment on any of the DB2 client or server platforms. Here is another option for your developers. To save costs you can license DE instead of ESE, WSE, or WSUE, but you cannot use DE for production work.

DB2 UDB Personal Developer's Edition (PDE) enables a developer to design and build single user desktop applications. Similar to DE, PDE is a lower cost development option for single user application development.

Then there is DB2 Express . It was announced in the first quarter of 2003 and IBM touts it as "a specially tailored database offering for the worldwide small and medium business (SMB) market, with focus on enterprises of size 100 to 1000 employees ." This "edition" is targeted at IBM's partners , encouraging them to build applications on top of DB2 Express targeting the SMB market.

The list of DB2s does not stop here. IBM has developed specialty editions of DB2 to handle heterogeneous, federated data and data that is not traditionally stored in databases.

Federation and Information Integration

No matter how entrenched DB2 might be in your organization, you'll likely have and use other DBMS products, too. Homogeneous IT organizations are extremely rare. Given that fact, how do businesses handle the need to access data from multiple disparate data sources? IBM attacks this problem through federation.

Federation enables businesses to access and integrate data from multiple locations as if it were stored in a single location. Federation enables customers to abstract a common data model across data and content sources and to access and manipulate them as though they were a single source.

IBM's DB2 Information Integrator offers the ability to integrate data from multiple sources of different kinds of information. The product enables access to data from hierarchical DBMSs such as IMS, other relational products such as Microsoft SQL Server, and other sources. When it's returned to the application, the data appears as if it came from DB2.

Content and Records Management

As businesses, government agencies, and other organizations continue to store more data of multiple types, applications will need to manage and unite all kinds of information ”structured data plus emails, phone recordings, faxes, video, and other information sources ”to solve business problems. RDBMSs traditionally focus on managing structured data, data that can be stored in rows and columns in a table. DB2 extenders expand the kinds of information it's possible to store; however, sometimes more in-depth manipulation and management of this unstructured, complex data is needed.

DB2 Content Manager provides support for two kinds of content management: media asset management and enterprise content management. Media asset management is the storage and management of collections of large multimedia objects, such as large collections of X-rays for a hospital, video and film content for movie studios , and scans of art collections for museums. Enterprise content management involves the storage and management of large collections of smaller multimedia objects ”often scanned check images for banks or scanned invoices, bills, or similar data for many kinds of businesses.

DB2 Information Integrator for Content provides a programming layer above DB2 Content Manager that facilitates easy access to many kinds of information from a single interface.

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DB2 Developers Guide
DB2 Developers Guide (5th Edition)
ISBN: 0672326132
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 388

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