Encounter of DB2 and Oracle !

On a journey to capture more of Oracle’s market and to meet the latest feature demands IBM decided to introduce another feature rich edition : The DB2 Advanced Enterprise Edition . This latest flagship edition brings lot of features you previously had to license individually,  IBM has priced it aggressively making it cheaper than buying them individually.  DB2 AES compared with Oracle makes the price comparison look like a Ford vs Cadillac. DB2 and Oracle are on the same league for performance and features and now the price for DB2 AES being cheaper gives an upper hand for IBM to market its favorite database engine. No offense IDS fans !
Lets dive a little deeper to see whats in DB2 AES.  DB2 Advanced Enterprise Edition is nothing more than DB2 Enterprise Edition with  bunch more features like :

DB2 Storage Optimization feature
DB2 Advanced Access Control feature
DB2 Workload Management feature
Optim Performance ManagerData Studio 2.2.1
Optim Development Studio 2.2.1
Optim Database Administrator 2.2.3
Homogeneous Replication feature
InfoSphere Federation Server between DB2 and Oracle data sources

The Storage Optimization feature delivers superior compression of data within tables, indexes, temporary tables, XML data, logs and backups. This greatly reduced the overall cost of the infrastructure that is required.  IBM claims around 83% compression rate on lab.  While doing a PoC, I have noticed 74% compression rate on the databases I run. This feature alone might justify the cost to upgrade from ESE to AESE .  The advanced security feature lets you to have label based access control against individual rows and columns on your tables.  In other words enable you to do fine grain security against your data.  The workload manager helps you to set the priority level of the database workload against your database on the server enabling to meet your SLAs. No more runaway query or poor adhoc report queries eating away cycles.  The product page contains a little more details on these features.

Currently, the package is available on DB2 V9.7 version, but IBM may let you convert your DB2 V9.5 or DB2 V9.1 to AES if you are under passport agreement with a step -up upgrade fee.  How does DB2 Advanced Enterprise Server Edition price against Oracle Enterprise ?

The follow table is based on a single process that amounts to 100 PVU:

* The cost comparison is based on the general pricing list from Oracle and IBM . For consistency, I have included 12 months of support.

One of my IBM representative send me the new db2 edition comparision in a pdf file

I believe IBM has woken up and realized they were lacking features that their competitions where offering.  I wish just include database encryption just like SQL Server Enterprise edition offers.  Now that will be awesome.