Teo Wan Ping, IBM Singapore’s brand manager for information management, said that IBM could “potentially offer” a free starter edition of DB2, as part of the company’s strategy to gain mindshare for its database product. IBM currently does not have a free version of its DB2 product, unlike free competing products like Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and Oracle’s Database XE released recently.
They will have to if they hope to grow their user base at all. DB2 is really, really good but not a real stand out in the field. I think more people probably have it confused with dbaseII.
DB2 is really, really good but not a real stand out in the field.
It does not stand out to small, medium, and maybe large businesses. It does stand out in large enterprises that depend on a fast, reliable DBMS. DB2 has proven itself in the enterprise field, both on paper through competitive TPC benchmarks and in practice through the usage in several high profile enterprises…
This free version probably wont directly improve their sales to smaller firms, but if they can get more people attracted to it, those people might express their DB2 preference if/when they get into larger enterprises…
I seem to recall getting a version of DB2 on CD about 6 or 7 years ago that somewhat assymptotically approached “free.” It was limited in the number of concurrent users, and probably in other ways as well.
Does anyone else remember this version of DB2?
IBM has no choice – they’re running defense now against Solaris10. They’re going to have to prove that DB2 is better than what’s included for *free* in Solaris… or Windows.
1) Its a reaction to Oracle and Microsoft; the fact is, they’ll lose nothing by lowering the bar, infact, when those adopters need more than just the starter edition, they’ll head to purchase the full version plus services; give the first taste of crack for free and they’re hooked for life.
2) DB2 will be available for Solaris x86 soon, along with all the other stuff that is available on Solaris SPARC; IBM is gradually getting there; personally, I’d love to see SUN turn around and say, “IBM, want to work together with Solaris PPC development” – get Solaris working on their big POWER servers.
I’m not so sure it will work. What likely will happen is that free databases like Postgresql, MySQL,… will improve much quicker when more people get to know what to demand from a good RDBMS. If some version of DB2 is freely available it will also be much easier to make sure that free RDBMSes stays compatible with commercial products.
As Postgressql and other free databases gets better, in terms of features, support and performance, nobody will settle for limited editions from IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.
The only way to fight this would be for IBM/Oracle/ Microsoft, to hire key developrs in free softwarare database projects and have them work on their propriatory product instead, or at least have them not work on a free database.
I asked my IBM rep to get his management to support Solaris on POWER. He said they’re trying to stall as long as they can, but it’d probably happen. That would be killer, wouldn’t it.