IBM Updates Database for Mobile Clients

Published: July 25, 2006

by Alex Woodie

IBM last week unveiled a new release of DB2 Everyplace, a slimmed down version of DB2 designed for access to corporate data stores from handheld devices. The database takes up just 350 KB, but can store tens of thousands of transactions originating from major relational databases, including DB2 UDB version 5.4 for iSeries, the latest release of DB2/400, as well as SQL Server, Informix, and Oracle databases.

DB2 Everyplace is available in two offerings, including DB2 Everyplace Database Edition, an OEM offering for mobile device manufacturers looking to embed a database solution into their Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, QNX Neutrino, and Linux-based personal digital assistants (PDAs). The other version is DB2 Everyplace Enterprise Edition, which includes the basic database as well as a Windows, Linux, or Unix-based synchronization server that performs real-time queries and keeps the handheld database up-to-date with the latest data.

With DB2 Everyplace version 9.1, IBM has added several new features and capabilities, including support for JDBC 3.0 Savepoint and for Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0. This release also expands the table, column, and index names from 18 to 128 bytes, introduces "unique index" support, and brings support for new data types.

The synch server and synch client components have also been enhanced, and this release brings support for Internet Protocol version 6. The synch server also gains new statistics that provides administrators with additional information about replication performance.

DB2 Everyplace 9.1 will be available in multiple languages on July 28.