Its tests with the new DB2 have shown it could increase data compression by 20 percent, on top of the already-substantial improvements in the previous version. The tests revealed "some really nice performance increases," DeJuneas said.

The update to InfoSphere is the first version of the software to support the Hadoop data processing framework, meaning users can commission Hadoop jobs and access the results directly from within InfoSphere. This is also the first version to allow for continually updated data sets, which can help organizations get closer to real-time data analysis.

DB2 version 10 can be downloaded at no cost for production environments that require no more than two processor cores and 2GB of memory. The price for larger implementations starts at US$6,180 including a year of support. InfoSphere pricing is based on number of processors or, for the first processor, the amount of data being stored. The basic version starts around $40,000 per terabyte.

The IDG News Service