IBM Sets DB2 Database Free (Beer)

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that in the hopes of winning more developer interest, IBM has released a free version of their DB2 database. From the article: "DB Express-C is the same database as IBM's commercial offerings but the company places limits on what kind of hardware it can run on. It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on Advanced Micro Devices- or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users. "

Comments

self taught learning?

[way2trivial]

want a job? job requires knowledge of a specific app? Ka-Ching....

Re:Question for/from the Inept

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I'm glad you're happy with MySQL for your personal web site. But what does that have to do with DB2? IBM is trying to attract developers, not small web site webmasters.

Re:Question for/from the Inept

[GWSuperfan]

I'm not sure I'd bother switching. MySQL 5 supports all sorts of cool features. Combine that with the fact that you already know the product and the decision as to whether or not to switch should be a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you need some feature that isn't in MySQL- but I haven't run into that particular problem yet.

A little too late?

[beacher]

Just some thoughts and possible misconceptions - I haven't used DB2 at all, but I am a heavy Oracle and occasional mysql DBA/user. I just went to IBM's DB2 page and was not very shocked to see their migration page

"Migrate Now! for DB2 Universal Database (UDB) facilitates the migration from Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL server, and additional database platforms to DB2 UDB at a special price. Migrate Now! is an end-to-end offering that includes migration tool kits, no-charge online education, sales teams and resources to assist you in planning and implementing your migration based on IBM's proven methodology."

I think it falls directly in step with IBM's shift in strategy - lower the software cost and generate service based revenues. I don't think I'll be moving my stuff over anytime soon. Oracle on the data warehouse (the app was built before mysql could do cross table updates), mysql on the select only local repository.
IBM may be too late for the vast majority of developers. The ones that offered their products to develop and learn on are the ones that will find some sort of loyalty.

Wow. No user limits or db size limits?

[WoTG]

You can serve quite a few users on a 4 core server! To me, this looks like a direct attack on MS SQL Server. A lot of software for small and medium sized businesses run on SQL Server. I doubt that IBM has much sales volume at the low end anyway, so what have they got to lose?

Re:Question for/from the Inept

[GooberToo]

I'm glad you brought up performance versus scalability. PostgreSQL is often considered slow by MySQL fans who fail to understand the concept of scalability. Simply stated, MySQL is typically faster than PostgreSQL with low scalability requirements yet PostgreSQL tends to scale much, much better than does MySQL for both complex queries and highly concurrent, mixed operation loads. Obviously, this is a rule of thumb and not a hard/fast rule. I'm sure there are corner cases (which is often put forward in MySQL benchmarks, which are not reflective of real world applications) in each camp which ignore the rule.

For people that do not understand scalability versus performance, let's put it like this:
MySQL is fast for one user and PostgreSQL, while fast for one user, tends to be slightly slower than MySQL. On the other hand, add a hundred concurrent, mixed operation (aka, not read only) users and MySQL tends to go belly up. At the same time, given the same example, PostgreSQL is happily chugging along; albiet at increased latencies. Of course, this statement is broad and makes many assumptions, but it will hopefully help others understand the concept.

So, given your rankings above, PostgreSQL, tends to find a middle ground between Oracle's performance/scalability ranking. In other words, PostgreSQL tends to scale less than Oracle yet tends to perform better. MySQL, on the other hand, performs fairly fast for read-only databases but scales very poorly.

Re:IBM Undercutting Itself?

[Kadin2048]

My theory on why the specs are so high is because IBM can afford to do that, without cutting into much of their marketshare. At least on the hardware end -- IBM does offer some lower-end servers, but their bread and butter are the high-end ones. So where somebody like Microsoft has to limit the specs on the free version pretty severely, because otherwise they won't have a retail product to sell, IBM knows that a lot of people want to run their database on big iron. And big iron is a lot of money, not just in the hardware, but also in the service contracts and stuff that go along with it.

If your database is mostly used on commodity, low-end hardware, you can't give away a version that runs on a quad-core, 4GB machine: that's eating into your home market. IBM can, because a lot of their revenue (I'm guessing) comes from machines much further up the specification ladder than that. In fact, they would love you to run DB/2 on a high end machine, because the sooner you do, the sooner you'll make use of it, and probably the sooner you'll find its limits. (Following the general rule that software expands to fill whatever resources you allocate to it.) And when you hit the limits of the commodity/low-end hardware, IBM would be more than happy to help you migrate your DB/2 install into something a little sweeter. For a price, naturally.

Also, since they're last to the free-version game, they want to one-up everyone else. Simple competition.

Anyway, I think the "spec creep" is a good thing for consumers, both IBM's and otherwise, because it might cause a 'free version war,' that can only be a good thing in the end.