Sneak Peek at IBM 'Viper' DB2 Release

Rob let us know that Computer Business Review magazine is reporting that IBM is about to add more fuel to the database fire. The company has offered up a sneak peek at their upcoming "Viper" release of their DB2 database. From the article: "DB2 Viper will be distinct from current DB2 database implementations in that it will be able to store XML formatted data inside the database natively--XML support will not be bolted onto the side. Viper will also support relational data stores, of course, and access to those database tables using the SQL programming language."

Comments

Re:"the SQL programming language"

[Ed Avis]

For those wondering about the difference: a good rule of thumb is that a programming language has recursion, or at least loops. SQL is less powerful than a full programming langauge because there are many things you can test in a program that you can't write an SQL query for. For example, if you have a table of (person, parent) relationships, you can't write a query to list all ancestors of a given person in form (person, ancestor). But you could easily do that given the same data and a general purpose programming language.

(Actually I think the very latest SQL standard may have some support for recursion to handle queries like this one. I don't know if it is Turing-complete though; I suspect not.)

Does this mean SQL is bad? No. Partly because it is less powerful than a full programming language, the database can often work out roughly what a given query will need to access and so make an efficient query plan for it. If what you want is expressible as SQL, it's very often a lot faster than coding the same thing in a general-purpose language, and easier to write and understand.