Oracle officials said the company began offering XML storage options five years ago and in July enabled users of its 10g database to natively search XML files using the XQuery markup language. IBM's native XML storage feature "doesn't add any value," said Mark Drake, an XML technology manager at Oracle.

Viper will also support XQuery for processing XML data, along with standard SQL. In addition, it will be the first DB2 release to support three different partitioning methods: range partitioning, multidimensional clustering and hashing. That support is aimed at helping IBM compete against Oracle, which has said that 10g offers six methods of partitioning data tables for faster access to information.

Despite estimates that the amount of unstructured or XML-formatted data at most companies is already larger and growing faster than structured relational data is, Yuhanna said he doesn't think that XML will replace SQL as the preferred data format.