Stinger Support for Linux

2.6"> Another big thing in Stinger is the support for the Linux 2.6 kernel. Why is Linux so essential to IBMs future? Weve been quite dedicated to making Linux successful and to making DB2 on Linux successful. From application development to working on open-source Linux itself, Linux runs on every one of our hardware platforms. This is a major direction for IBM and has been a major direction for DB2 since we produced the first clustered database for Linux. We continue to support more processors and the newest versions of Linux as they come out. Linux is important for us because its important for our customer set. We see a lot of customers moving from Linux as their Web servers to Linux as their mission-critical systems. I see a number of customers looking at Linux for their warehouses. That means, for us, Linux clusters. We have the ability to be very strong there. Our ICE [Integrated Cluster Environment] offering for Linux is one [for which] were seeing a lot of positive momentum. This builds on DB2 strengths of being able to scale to large numbers of nodes, between two and 1,000. Whats going on with content management? The natural direction for customers to go is not only to store XML documents in a DB2 database but to look for content solutions built on this technology. IBMs Content Manager is built around DB2 as the card catalog, so to speak. What we see are directions where customers are expecting more and more content management out of database engines. The XML content were building in will give them that ability, and were also working very actively to form the Java Standard JSR 170. What I see here is that content management systems have been thought of as a different idea than database systems. Theyve been focused on classic bank-account, inventory types of ideas. With Content Manager, those two worlds will bridge. Users will be able to use Xquery as a query language to query about documents and use XML as a richer data type. An easy way to think about it is to think of an application programmer who has to write a program to look at data. Id like them to use one interface for DB2 and get all that data, whether its in a content management system or in DB2 directly, and use one interface to do that, so they can build applications 50 percent faster than they have to today. People complained about DB2s GUI back in Version 6. Theyre still grumbling a bit about Stingers command-line interface. Any plans to tweak that? Command-line interface is very valuable to our customer sets who have built up a set of their own management tools or bought from a third party, where they run things in batches or scripts. If they have thousands of servers to manage, this is a very good way for them to do that. This isnt going away. We also want to offer point-and-click levels of management as well, so you can, from a Web browser, do a lot of tasks that administrators have to do. I dont see that changing. Check out eWEEK.coms Database Center at http://database.eweek.com for the latest database news, views and analysis. Be sure to add our eWEEK.com database news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page: