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Summary - 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 3,300 words
BM has become legendary in the Linux community for its repeated announcements and reannouncements regarding Linux support. It seems every six months at some Linux show or even a general PC show, IBM pledges across-the-board Linux support. That is all very odd because since Big Blue's first altar conversion a couple of years ago, it has done a great deal for the Linux community (despite purported resistance from the AIX group), but by constantly reproclaiming its allegiance, it gives the impression that it never followed through on prior pledges.
The truth is that IBM's many contributions to Linux have been typical Big Blue: very practical and thus very boring. Jikes, IBM JDK, Apache patches, and a Linux port to the 300 series mainframes (someone was very bored) are not exactly the sorts of goodies that have a Linux pundit hopping up and down, but they provide real, solid bases for businesses looking at Linux for critical tasks. Not that IBM is incapable of splashy software: its remarkable Alphaworks project has contributed rather nifty stuff to the Java and XML communities (pretty much all of which runs on Linux). See my recent articles on XML and Linux in Resources for more details.
Besides contributing to free Linux software, IBM has been supporting Linux with its popular and well respected commercial offerings ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"). IBM has made moves in that direction from both the hardware end, such as the Thinkpad, to the software end, such as the subject of this article: DB2.
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,...