IBM Corp. is refreshing its 34-year-old DB2 relational database management system with features that mirror those of the increasingly popular breed of hybrid transactional/analytical databases, while at the same time making it easier for developers to get started via a community edition that can be deployed to a variety of computer systems via software containers.

A new version of the DB2 Developer Community Edition is aimed at lowering the barriers for developers to try out the relational engine. The free version is now wrapped in a Docker container for fast deployment; IBM claimed it can be downloaded and installed in less than 15 minutes. “We’re targeting developers who may not know anything about DB2,” said  Rob Thomas (pictured), general manager of IBM Analytics.

IBM said the Community Edition is a full-featured version of DB2, but is intended for testing only. “If you want to deploy it as a highly available database across multiple data centers, you’ll need the enterprise version,” Thomas said.

In a nod to the surging success of NoSQL and in-memory hybrids like SAP SE’s Hana, IBM has also added native support for JavaScript Object Notation and rolled out a technical preview of BLU Acceleration in-memory secondary index support.

JSON is the lightweight, “human readable” data-interchange format that is widely used to describe unstructured data. IBM said users can now move any application from the document-oriented NoSQL MongoDB platform to DB2 without modification, as long as standard SQL is used. The integration makes it possible for applications that don’t lend themselves well to relational structure – such as capturing clickstream data – to run alongside production workloads.

BLU Acceleration is a collection of technologies for analytical database workloads developed by IBM Research. It enables users to avoid replicating data, and thus reducing available memory, for analytical tasks. Secondary indices improve performance of some queries for operational data store and analytic warehouses.

The new features position DB2 closer to Hana, which SAP recently said is approaching 6,000 installations and is its principal driver of new business. However, Thomas wouldn’t draw a direct comparison. The refreshed DB2 “is a fair comparison to what SAP says it can do,” he said. “They’re trying to enter the market and become enterprise-scale. DB2 has been around for 30 years.”

IBM is also enhancing DB2 on Cloud, a fully managed DB2 service, with more flexible resource allocation and an improved console.

Photo: SiliconANGLE