"Dal Mon" <da******@gmail.comwrote in message
news:11**********************@g4g2000hsf.googlegro ups.com...
>I have always been confused abuot the terminology. What is the
difference between DB2 and UDB? Are they one and the same? Is one a
subset of the other?
Thanks in advance.
-Dal Mon
This was basically a marketing problem, in that IBM had the following
relational products at one time:
DB2 for MVS
SQL/DS (for VM)
SQL/400 (for AS/400)
OS/2 Database Manager (OS/2) which latter became DB2/2 and then DB2/6000 for
AIX
Oracle always was able to say that they had a single code base for all
platforms (although some of the versions don't work very well on certain
platforms).
So IBM came up with the UDB label for DB2 Linux, Unix, and Windows (and OS/2
up to V7). Then DB2 for z/OS and DB2 for iSeries added the UDB label when
they reached a certain level of compatibility with DB2 for Linux, UNIX and
Windows. This was supposed to be the big merge when all the features where
available on all platforms and the SQL was completely compatible (or 99.9 %
compatible) and they were all called UDB.
The problem is that most corporate customers that had DB2 on the mainframe
and also DB2 LUW used the UDB label to refer the DB2 for LUW product (as
opposed to the mainframe DB2) and the UDB nickname stuck to the LUW product
before the z/OS version had a chance to adopt the UDB name. As already
mentioned, the UDB name is being dropped on all platforms.
You can blame the IBM marketing people for this fiasco, but ultimately it
may be the customer's fault because they are the ones who fall for marketing
BS, such as buying a database based on features that they will never use (or
maybe never should use) or running on platforms they will never use.