The DB2 9.7 server (herein referred to as DB2 9.7) release is a significant one, though that shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone. In fact, all the releases since DB2 8.2 have propelled DB2 as an industry leader in ease of use, storage optimization, scalability, and more. DB2 9.7 is packed with so many really cool features (and others that aren’t so cool, but important to your database) that we couldn’t possibly cover it all in this short book. Consequently, we decided to get together and vote on the authoring team’s favorite features from this release’s specification. It was a tough and furious road, with lobbying by authors interested in specific technologies, grueling speeches, mud-slinging that rivals any US presidential election, and more (come to think of it, most of the mud-slinging was about each other— nothing to do with the book). Perhaps it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that easy either. The results of this feature election are this book and the chapters within.

We know that not everyone will agree with our choices, andwehad to make some tough ones. For example, the Eclipse-based Data Studio is now the de facto tooling (you download it separately) for IBM database servers, but we don’t cover that. Nevertheless, we strongly recommend that you check out Data Studio (and the unbelievable value found in their associated Optim add-ons): Data Studio is a segue into the IBM Integrated Data Management (IDM) story and it’s free!