Re: Good News for MS Windows users: Your favorite database is here..

On Sun, 20 May 2001 22:26:30 GMT, Mark Townsend wrote:

>>> Mark - the original claim seemed to be only for Unix, Windows, and OS/2. And
>>> it was only for the four UDB products themselves, not any add-ons. The only
>>> incorrect implication was that Personal Edition existed everywhere (it's only
>>> on OS/2, Windows, and Linux).
>
>Some of these are not actually add-ons - they are included in the list of
>functional capabilities whenever IBM describes the DB2 product.
>
>Here's a quote from the IBm web page
>
>> The DB2 Product family runs on non-IBM machines such as Sun and
>> Hewlett-Packard as well as IBM hardware, and operating systems such as
>> Windows, Linux, Sun's Solaris Operating Environment, HP-UX, NUMA-Q, AIX, OS/2,
>> and handheld device operating systems such as Windows CE* and the Palm
>> Computing* platform.
>
>Unfortunately some of the member of the DB product Family simply aren't
>available on all IBM supported Unix platforms (AIX,Solaris, HP-UX and
>Dynix), all IBM supported Windows platforms (Win NT and W2000), and many
>aren't available on Linux at all. As an example,

The same SQL is available on the entire line - it didn't say the entire family was available everywhere. I'm supposing that it's due to market demand vs testing time to test that functionality on all platforms.

As for Linux, I'm betting on that being a mere matter of time.

>The AVI extenders, which I believe are bundled with every edition of IBM
>UDB, don't seem to be available on Linux, Windows2000 or Dynix. The text
>extender has a similar fate. Other add-ins, which may be chargeable items,
>have even less support - for example IBM DB2 Spatial Extender runs on AIX,
>Windows 2000 and Windows NT only. Pity the poor customer that wants to text,
>image and location enable their web sites if they are on any of the other
>'supported' IBM platforms. So the statement "Precisely the same functional
>capability is offered in the four packages on these platforms" is NOT
>correct.

None of these are part of the four packages mentioned, AFAIK. They are add-ins, whether chargeable or not.

>Standard Edition IS factored different from Enterprise Edition - that's why
>its cheaper. By and large, the APIs are the same for application
>portability, but Enterprise does include certain key unique features that
>are more applicable to very large systems with a large numbers of users, or
>large amount of data, or high end hardware systems. The rationale being that
>if you are just chipping around, you can use Standard Edition, but if you
>are mission critical, you should use Enterprise Edition.

Sounds exactly like Workgroup Edition and Enterprise Edition for DB2.

>What's the rationale behind IBM WE being exactly the same functionality as
>IBM EE, but less in price ? Intelligence test for customers ?

Licensing agreements are drastically different between them. And DB2 UDB EE has a little more functionality, namely the ability to connect to a DRDA server (primarily DB2 on OS/390, AS/400, etc.), and the ability to act as a gateway for those DRDA servers. In fact, there is a little more (licensed) functionality in each. Workgroup has the ability to receive inbound connections to its databases, whereas Personal does not. And EEE has the ability to distribute the workload over multiple nodes (whether physical or merely logical), whereas none of the others do. There is a growth in functionality, but there is also a large difference in licensing. Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 18:04:30 CDT