The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

DB2 Personal Edition

Browsing the shelves at Fry's the other week, I noticed that IBM has a Personal Edition of DB2 on the market.

It just seemed curious to me, since I've never heard anyone mention it on this board or others. Yet, DB2 is the 3rd leading enterprise database in sales and has been gaining market share on Oracle. I've used it in the past on AS/400 systems, and DB2 is a solid product with great support resources available on IBM's website.

But the lack of developer chatter about it makes me think that DB2's marketing team is doing a lousy job. Even worse, I looked on-line and their pricing makes no sense. Fry's had v 7.1 priced at $39.99. On-line, IBM is selling Personal Edition v 8.1 for $461, and the Developer's Personal Edition v 8.1 for $0. $461 seems a little steep to me. I think Access is priced similarly as a standalone product, but when packaged with Office it comes out considerably less. Also, I see no upgrade pricing available for the DB2 Personal Edition. So, their marketing / pricing stratgey seems half-baked - like their dabbling in the deskptop market, but not really willing to commit to it.

OK, so let's say I'm willing to belly up to the bar and plop down a hefty $0 for the developer's edition. Has anyone used DB2 on the desktop? This has sparked my curiousity.

SQLing like a Pig
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

"But the lack of developer chatter about it makes me think that DB2's marketing team is doing a lousy job"

What's that? You're saying you think the company that built PC's that wouldn't run its own OS would do a lousy marketing job?

Say it isn't so.

Philo

Philo
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

You could say the same thing about Dell. What do you think about Dell's marketing.

christopher baus (www.summitsage.com)
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

No enterprise DBMS vendor has ever really committed to the desktop -- it's not where they make their money and not a place they ever *will* make their money. If you want a SQL product at home, use MS Access or PostgreSQL.

If you’re just playing around, download the ‘developer’s’ edition from the company. I’m pretty sure that Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, ASE all have a freely-downloadable version.

MR
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

they are no 3 'cos they bought Informix!

And you might want to try Oracle - its a free d/l.

Prakash S
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

OK, a little update on my own topic. IBM does have a cheaper version for the desktop called DB2 Express, which is priced at $128 when buying multiple licenses (must be some sort of base 2 pricing scheme). So the price is reasonable.

It turns out that IBM is number 2 (not 3 as I stated above) in RDBMS sales and has been steadily gaining ground on Oracle. Since DB2 is their flagship database product, I don't know how much the Informix acquisition effected this.

I had considered using Access, but nothing installed on my system qualified me for the upgrade pricing, so I balked at the standalone price. I have looked at Oracle and have seen their trial version on-line before (don't see it now), but the free DB2 version isn't just a trial version. As far as DB2 versus PostgresQL, MySQL, etc - I would rather pay and have a nice suite of GUI tools than deal with the hodge-podge available in the OSS world. And the suite of tools for DB2 looks very nice, but they are written in Java so who knows.

I've gotta admit, I don't get the Dell reference. Dell's marketing seems to be annoyance based - the theory that the more annoying a commercial is, the more people are likely to remember it.

As far as DB's in the desktop marketplace, I doubt that MS is losing money with Access. So if IBM has a product that can compete, why not market it? I wouldn't be the big bucks like they get from their enterprise sales, but it's still revenue.

SQLing like a Pig
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

A lot of this stems from Microsoft's introduction of MSDE. A lot of commercial products that used Access have moved to MSDE (making it an easy transition to scale up to SQL Sever). By offering similar low-end version of their database IBM now has a the same scale-up path.

Marc
Tuesday, November 4, 2003