What is the Future of DB2?

[arneldave]

I often wonder who will ultimately take the lion's share of the database market. Oracle and Microsoft seem to have a strong lead while IBM and Sybase seem to be lagging behind. And for some reason Sybase seems to be almost not even on the same course as the others.

So I was on the phone with one of the IBM execs last week, and I asked him why I never see DB2 in full production in companies I visit, and when I do, it's usually only in the process of being transitioned to Oracle or SQL Server. He was quite frank with me and said that IBM hadn't been as good at marketing DB2 as they'd like. I didn't really get whether there were any active plans to increase the marketing campaign or not, but he was very discouraged to hear that DB2 isn't more ubiquitous than it is.

The truth is that DB2 has some ground-breaking features that could take the database world to the next level. I think we can all agree that IBM has always pioneered database research. Their last couple versions of DB2 have brought some incredible advancements to the world of databases. The methods they use for updating statistics, caching execution plans, storing XML data, and providing row-level data compression are virually unmatched by any of the other vendors. So again, why are Oracle and Microsoft killing DB2 in the marketplace?

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