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.
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