Screaming Penguin

IBM has apparently shored up several weaknesses of DB2 and continues to gun for Oracle. Oracle still holds 42% of the DB market, IBM is at 31%. IBM has gained on Oracle and is still coming on strong. One of the touted new features is really pretty trivial. The new "health center" can do things like "continually monitors the health of the database. If it finds a potential problem, such as the database running out of memory to store data, the database can automatically notify administrators via e-mail, pager or personal digital assistant, she said. The database will also give advice on how to fix the problem." Wow, if you have problems such as that and dont already have monitoring then you need some new DBA help. This new highly publicized feature is really very elementary and has nothing to do with real database issues. The linked news.com article has more details about this and other new DB2 features. I suspect that it should not be too hard for DB2 to gain on Oracle if the product has the basics and the price and support is solid. Oracle may be good stuff, may be GREAT stuff, may be the BEST stuff, but they cant hold the market and or gain on the market with their price structure. If Oracle made only a few modest moves towards reality in pricing, game over.   IBM tests "self-healing" software: news.com