> This sounds suspiciously like marketing speak.

As some of you here may know, I'm a technical evangelist for IBM. I try to remain factual, but I may occasionally be a tad biased. I disclose my (IBM) affiliation in my profile, but edited my comment and added a disclaimer there as well.

> I graduated in 2006, and we never even spoke of DB2 in my time at the University of Michigan.

We have a "DB2 on Campus" initiative (started in July 2006) [1] that has spread to over 250 universities worldwide so far, with about 30,000 students and teachers participating in the program.

> What makes it ideal to startups (any cool examples)? What innovations exist in DB2 that are not available elsewhere?

Unlike different "express" editions provided by other vendors, DB2 Express-C doesn't impose limits on the size of the database, the number of users that can be connected, and so on. This means that a startup can begin using DB2 Express-C for free, while taking advantage of a fast, secure, rock solid, very scalable database that's already being used by large corporations for mission critical work. If you were to hit the jackpot and become highly successful, DB2 would be able to scale with you from your VPS box all the way to a cluster of instances running in parallel within a huge cloud environment.

The free edition will use up to 2 CPU cores, and 2 GB of RAM, regardless of the hardware installed on your server. This is usually plenty, if you consider that many smaller startups don't even have a dedicated database VPS with 2 GB of RAM.

For less than three grand a year, you can also obtain 24/7 technical support from IBM as well as the ability to access further features, like the possibility of setting up a fail over server through the so-called "High Availability and Disaster Recovery" (HADR) feature. This upgrade also enables DB2 to use 4 CPU cores, and up to 4 GB of RAM.

IBM directly implements and supports APIs for various languages, including PHP, Ruby, and more recently Python. When you have an issue with any of those, you have people accountable for, and well paid to solve your problems. If you are wondering, those are open source, too, in case you like doing things DYI style. And we offer advanced tools like IBM Data Studio, free of charge as well. [2]

Learning DB2 is fairly straightforward, and there is a great deal of free information. Amongst which you'll find a course that was extracted from the DB2 on Campus program [3] and free ebooks [4].

Regarding features, DB2 introduced something called pureXML. This allows you to natively store huge quantities of XML data and query it through SQL/XML, XPath, XQuery. It's amazingly fast. [5]

The autonomic features of DB2 are also unmatched, enabling DB2 to self-tune itself, while limiting the amount of work required to administer and optimize DB2.

There are also more "enterprisey" features like DPF, very advanced compression capabilities, pureQuery, InfoSphere Warehouse powered by DB2, and so on. But these are typically of less interest to early stage startups.

1. http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_progra...

2. https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?so...

3. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/DB2+on+C...

4. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/FREE+Boo...

5. http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/11/04/benchmarking-db2-purex...