Native XML Database

Today, IBM announced new releases of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse that support high-performance analytic workloads for native XML data. New features include:
– Support for native XML data with hash partitioning (database partitioning)
– Support for native XML data with range partitioning (table partitioning)
– Support for native XML data with multi-dimensional clustering
– Support for predicate pushdown with native XML data in database views
– Deep compression of native XML data
– And more

These features have been tested by more than 300 participants in the DB2 Early Access Program, which has been active since April of 2008. Here is a small selection of the feedback we have received from those participants:

“…XML in a data warehouse was a very important feature to implement, and it’s now a complete feature…”
    Jean-Marc Blaise, Venedim

“…The parallelization of queries and inserts of the XML data will allow our researchers to gain access to the data they require even faster…”
    Tom Holdener, BJC HealthCare

“…XML compression reduces disk space consumption by more than 60%, irrespective of the size of the XML documents…”
    Phil Nelson, ScotDB

“…The enhancements will allow ULCA to generate business intelligence using XML data to help meet patient care needs…”
    Charles Wang, UCLA Health System

“…The new XML scalability and analytic capabilities in DB2 are quite exciting…”
    Neal Keene VP of Industry Solutions, Thunderhead

Over the course of the next week or so, I will talk in more detail about these new features.