More Compatibility and Concurrency with DB2 Version 9.7

Also at this year’s IDUG conference, Cobra DB2 9.7 was discussed with its many great new features. I experienced a number of these enhancements as I went through the DB2 Cobra beta program with IBM. Now that IBM has officially announced DB2 9.7, I can happily talk about it. Two of the many enhancements within DB2 Version 9.7 that I really like are its greater compatibility and concurrency.

DB2 9.7 brings more compatibility because DB2 now handles more data types such as the NUMBER, VARCHAR2 and the ability to specify the DATE format desired. The TIMESTAMP is also enhanced with parameters that control the number of fractional seconds (picoseconds) from zero to 12 picoseconds of precision. All of these enhancements provide the developer the ability to specify exactly what they need for the application.

These features also provide compatibility with the other DBMSs in the industry such as Oracle, SQL Server and MYSQL and allow their applications to be consolidated easily into a more stable and high performance DB2 database.

DB2 9.7 also brings more concurrency with a new isolation level called Currently Committed for OLTP and data warehouse processing. This new isolation level, Currently Committed, is the new default for DB2 and provides more concurrency by being able to avoid deadlocks or blocking read activities.

In previous releases of DB2 processes reading the database could block writers to the database in an application that opens a cursor in the DBMS, fetches one row at a time, and iterates through the result set as it processes the data. In DB2 Version 9.7 the processing is enhanced through DB2’s new ability to bypass locked rows and read their currently committed state from the active log. By avoiding the locked row DB2 processing continues. Readers don’t block writers and writers don’t block readers allowing moiré database processing concurrency.

Of course there are other great enhancements within DB2 Version 9.7 that I will cover in the upcoming weeks.

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