IBM has topped an autumn flurry of Db2 updates with new features for its Intelligence Center console, promising to let users manage deployments of the 42-year-old database across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments from a single place.
IBM said its unified database management console was "AI-powered" to support refreshes across high-volume monitoring pages and reduce installation time with containerized deployments. It also promises enhanced monitoring of IBM’s Db2 PureScale, a clustering technology for on-prem and cloud deployments, speeding up diagnosis and improving continuous availability.
The update is part of a string of announcements following the Db2 12.1.3 enhancements in October. It is only a little more than three years since IBM [announced a cloud-first str…
IBM has topped an autumn flurry of Db2 updates with new features for its Intelligence Center console, promising to let users manage deployments of the 42-year-old database across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments from a single place.
IBM said its unified database management console was "AI-powered" to support refreshes across high-volume monitoring pages and reduce installation time with containerized deployments. It also promises enhanced monitoring of IBM’s Db2 PureScale, a clustering technology for on-prem and cloud deployments, speeding up diagnosis and improving continuous availability.
The update is part of a string of announcements following the Db2 12.1.3 enhancements in October. It is only a little more than three years since IBM announced a cloud-first strategy for Db2. That lagged other popular relational databases, which are already widely offered as managed services by hyperscalers and specialist cloud providers.
Nonetheless, Big Blue is striving to catch up. The 12.1.3 release, for example, followed the introduction of vector data types for Db2 – an AI-supporting feature introduced by some databases years ago – by adding connectors for Python frameworks LangChain and LlamaIndex so that AI app developers can quickly build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications like chatbots or knowledge retrieval systems, for example.
Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said Db2 was rising to the demands of AI and hybrid data. "Its architecture is built around today’s key priorities: availability, integrity, performance, and AI readiness, helping teams handle growing data complexity with less manual effort."
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Db2 was modeled on the ideas of IBM researcher Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd, who first described the theory of relational databases in 1970. The first products became available on IBM mainframes in 1983 and later on Unix, Linux, and Windows. Since the 1980s, Db2 has become a database of choice for applications that need to be both big and dependable. Even today, banks make up nearly 43 percent of Db2’s user base, according to some measures. Among them are American Express, Bank of America, Citibank, and Deutsche Bank.
IBM recently signed an OEM agreement with Cockroach Labs, which makes a distributed PostgreSQL-like cloud RDBMS called CockroachDB. Big Blue said the deal would help modernize mission-critical applications reliant on mainframe hardware. An independent Db2 expert told The Register the offering might appeal to Db2 users looking to build new applications in the cloud, but they might be averse to converting existing applications to CockroachDB, a startup founded around ten years ago.
The latest raft of updates suggests IBM is trying to offer users a range of routes to modernize their Db2 systems. Whether it can attract new users is another matter. ®