Oracle to DB2 UDB Conversion Guide2003

1.1 DB2 family of products

In the era of Information on demand, IBM Information management software offers a wide range of products to accommodate different business needs and technical requirements in order to provide customers with a robust and scalable enterprise wide solution.

DB2 UDB offers database solutions that run on all platforms including Windows servers, AIX®, Sun, HP-UX, Linux, AS/400®, OS/390 and z/OS®. Furthermore, DB2 UDB technologies support both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. DB2 UDB product family comprises a variety of packages provide customers choices based on the business need. The following lists the DB2 UDB product offerings for Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows:

• DB2 UDB Enterprise Server Edition (ESE)

  DB2 UDB ESE is designed to meet the database server needs of midsize to large businesses. ESE's high scalability, availability, and reliability features provide customers an ideal database management system for all types of transactions:

  • The Database Partitioning Feature (DPF)

    The Database Partitioning Feature is a licensing option that allows ESE customers to partition a database within a single system or across a cluster of systems. The DPF capability provides the customer with multiple benefits including scalability to support very large databases, or complex workloads and increased parallelism for administration tasks.

• DB2 Workgroup Server Edition (WSE)

  This Edition is designed for deployment at a departmental level or in a small business environment with a small number of users. It can be deployed on a server with up to 4 CPUs.

• DB2 Workgroup Server Unlimited Edition (WSUE)

  This product offers a simplified per processor licensing for deployment at a departmental level or in a small business environment.

• DB2 Personal Edition (PE)

  This flavor of DB2 provides a database management system for a single user database.

• DB2 UDB Developer's Edition

  This product offers a package for single application developer to design and build an application.

• DB2 UDB Personal Developer's Edition (PDE)

  Similar to the Developer's edition, this product enables the developer to build a single user desktop application.

• DB2 Express

  This is the newest member of DB2 UDB product family. The key features include simplified deployment, autonomic management capabilities, and application development support and design for 7/24 operation. This flavor of DB2 UDB is aimed at Independent Software Vendors (ISV) who want to integrate DB2 UDB as part of their application with low cost, and have the capability to expand easily in the future.

Information Management software extends the functionality of DB2 UDB by offering different technologies called extenders, which serve as Web application tools. The extenders include: Text extender for performing text searches; Image extender for image manipulation operations; XML extender, which enables storing and retrieving data in the form of XML documents; Spatial extender to manipulate spatial data; and Audio and Video extenders, which handle both audio and video files respectively.

IBM also provides federated technologies to extend the functionality of DB2 UDB. With DB2 Information Integrator (DB2 II) you can access objects in many different databases such as Oracle and Sybase with a single query.

In addition, DB2 Connect™ Editions offer you the capability to extend your enterprise system to access the legacy system.

Appendix A, "DB2 UDB product overview" on page 335 provides a detailed description of the capabilities and features of DB2 UDB products.