IBM was little late in the relational database business on Linux, Unix and Windows platforms compared to the Oracle even though IBM was the inventor of RDBMS. With new release of DB2 9, IBM has taken the lead in innovations in relational database with the introduction of hybrid databases.
This new technology has been in research in various IBM labs for many years and it has struck the market place with a bang. This technology is so cool and if you do not agree with me, please read this brand new free book DB2 9 PureXML® guide. If by any chance, you are not able to open the link, try this link.
One of the author of this book is my friend Arthur V Sammartino and this is why you are seeing this entry here as my respect towards him. But apart from friendship, there are many neat things about PureXML® as shown below:
- XML data is stored and queried in its inherent hierarchical format. This is the biggest difference eliminating shredding of XML data which is stored as BLOB in other databases. DB2 stores and manipulates XML data in a parsed format that reflects the hierarchical nature of the original XML document.
- You can query XML data using SQL/XML and XQuery. Either use XQuery and SQL separately or embed XQuery in SQL and vice versa.
- New indexing technology to speed searches involving XML data
- Store any well-formed XML document in any column defined on the new XML data type.
- A single column can contain documents with different structures (or schemas) as well as different contents.
- Option of registering XML schemas and to validate XML documents against these schemas prior to storage.
- Enhancements in programming langauge interface such as JDBC, DB2 .Net Driver, C, COBOL, and PHP to take advantage of new XML capabilities.