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

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001 23:04:27 GMT, Mark Townsend wrote:
>
> 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.

I guess you're referring to one of the business decisions IBM made as any other company is doing it.

Look at the history of AVI: IBM was the first out with such a product more than 6/7 years back. DB2 was in a completely different stage, a lot of features were added since then. So the question is how much to invest into the existing product to pick up these changes and what the outcome will be. It might be a completely new product, incorporating the best from the old one as well as the new DB2 features. Far fetched? No, not at all - that's what happened with the Text Extender, where the Text Information Extender was released first time with version 7.2 a few months back, which is basically a new product.

The DB2 Spatial Extender was released for the first time in September 2000. So we're talking about a completely new product here, too. I think it's quite acceptable to start out on a small set of platforms and try to get a feeling for the market and go from there, wouldn't you agree?

It seems that Spatial is indeed interesting for our customers, so we're expanding our business and along with that the range of supported platforms. Sure, version 7 ships only on the Windows platforms and AIX for now. But as I happen to know from well-informed circles, we will indeed port it to other platforms. Linux? Sure, I run it on my laptop against a DB2 EEE with 4 logical partitions.

And pretty much the same is going on with the Text Information Extender.

-- 
Knut Stolze
DB2 UDB Spatial Extender
IBM Silicon Valley Lab