The Coming pureScale Invasion

I’ve thought for a long time that one of the biggest issues that IBM has faced in getting more traction with pureScale is that it’s only included in the Advanced editions of DB2 – Advanced Workgroup Server Edition and Advanced Enterprise Server Edition. The recent announcement of the Business Application Continuity Offering will help expand the pureScale footprint to even more customers.

IBM made the bold move a few years ago to release a free version of DB2 – Express-C – to help drive adoption of DB2 among developers. This was followed with some excellent work by others in the lab supporting popular programming environments, leading to DB2 support in Perl, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, etc.

Even more amazing, as IBM developed truly cutting edge features like pureXML and Native Encryption and added them to the engine, they were wise enough to include them in DB2 Express-C as well.

Well, I have been hearing some whispers lately that IBM is about to do it again, and will provide their world-class scaling and availability solution to everyone, for free. I can tell you that I am really looking forward to IBM including pureScale in DB2 Express-C. Of course, there is one very minor restriction¹ for the pureScale support in Express-C, but the given that the other restrictions that IBM puts on Express-C are extremely generous it should help pureScale adoption go through the roof.

I thought the release date was going to be April 1, but I still haven’t seen anything official. Regardless, I can’t wait.

– Ian Bjorhovde (@idbjorh)