Oracle, for its part, was mum on what it has cooking in research and development. In the meantime, 9i focuses on improving performance and scalability by clustering and caching. IBM also has a new release of DB2 due in the middle of this year, although officials decline to say exactly when or whether it is a point release or a new version worthy of a nice round number. The company says that the next version will continue its push toward incorporating more data sources into the federated approach, as well as furthering scalability. Microsoft won't say when we can expect the next version of SQL Server.
Analysts say that on the whole such technologies make databases more complete solutions.
We want to provide data management to the universe of nonrelational data. Although several companies once competed in the database space, a number of vendors, such as Sybase, have honed in on specific niches such as financial institutions and telecommunications companies. Calif.-based Oracle's centralized philosophy and IBM's federated data style. Understanding that very few customers have all their relational data in a single vendor's database, Big Blue's approach is to be capable of managing data residing just about anywhere, including competitors' databases, and to extend the functionality of its flagship database, DB2, to other data types and locations, including competitors' databases. One of the most important advantages to the federated approach is that companies don't need to migrate data from a variety of sources, such as legacy and nonrelational systems, into a single repository.