Edgar Codd had worked at IBM in the 1970s when he published his papers around “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. It is still considered the foundation of relational databases and data normalization. Fast forward. IBM was not able to turn that early research and data center leadership into a significant business. A database is only as powerful as the solutions built on top of it, the platforms it is available on and an ecosystem of people who make their career with it. IBM never realized that. As we sit here in 2022 the only reason DB2 is still relevant is from those applications brought online in the last century – specifically the mainframe or UNIX platform.
Let’s break down what any technology needs to be successful in modern computing:
Platform
Either on premise or in a cloud, where can you provision DB2 easily? Not AWS, not Azure, not Google Cloud. The only cloud is in IBM’s itself. You can get DB2 as a docker image, if you consider Docker a ‘platform’. To get a perspective, Postgres has been downloaded over 1 billion times, DB2 about 1 million.
Solutions
SAP is pushing clients to S4/HANA (which only runs on SAP HANA database), no born-cloud application is running on DB2 and the number of applications running DB2 as a primary database is a short list. Even when IBM gives DB2 away within other solutions, clients use SQLServer or Oracle.
Innovation
If major releases of a product are an indication of innovations, DB2 has been challenged. Below is the End of Support Dates for Linux/UNIX/Windows as the ZOS is a completely different code stream and versioning:
| Release | Release Data | End of Base Support | End of Extended Support | Withdraw Continues Support |
| V8.x | Oct 10, 2006 | April 30, 2009 | April 30, 2012 | Sept 30, 2022 |
| V9.1 | Sept 22, 2006 | April 30, 2012 | April 30, 2015 | September 30, 2022 |
| V9.5 | Dec. 14, 2007 | April 30, 2015 | April 30, 2018 | September 30, 2022 |
| V9.7 | Sept 19, 2010 | Sept 30, 2017 | September 30, 2020 | |
| V10.1 | June 11, 2012 | Sept 30, 2017 | September 30, 2020 | |
| V10.5 | July 26, 2013 | April 30, 2020 | April 30, 2023 | |
| V11.1 | June 15, 2016 | April 30, 2022 | April 30, 2025 | |
| V11.5 | June 25, 2019 | Not announced |
There has not been a major release of DB2 for over 5 ½ years as they look to drive incremental fixes to bring DB2 to ‘the cloud’.
People
Do people know DB2 from a technology perspective? Are the modern tools supporting DB2? If we consider two measures around market perception, the first is using google trends to gauge interest in DB2 searches on the internet.
The second is something as mundane as ’how many people know DB2 – administration, coding, upgrading, etc?’. When searching the internet, even IBM shared only 687 people have taken introductory DB2 training. Even worse, the latest training is for DB2 v11.1 – which goes end of mainstream support this year!
NOW WHAT?
It is time to realize the next generation of technologies for data management. Platform 3 Solutions has turnkey tools and DB2 experts to help with your move off of DB2. Platform 3 Solutions can:
- Connect to your DB2 environment – whether it’s on a mainframe, UNIX or Windows
- Automate the analysis of the data definitions and relationships
- Automate the analysis and sizing of the need (This helps organizations decide what to migrate –vs- archive –vs- delete.)
- Bring forward any business logic to migrate into a new database environment – whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud
Learn more at www.platform3solutions.com. Schedule a conversation with us or send a request here.