Viper will be IBM's first DB2 update to support three different partitioning methods: range partitioning, multidimensional clustering and hashing. That helps IBM better compete with Oracle, which already offers an assortment of partitioning methods in its flagship database software.

Bob Picciano , IBM vice president of database servers, highlighted Viper in his keynote address today at the XML 2005 Conference in Atlanta.

To encourage Web developers to check out its software, IBM plans to offer a beta version of Viper with Zend Technologies Ltd.'s Zend Core for IBM by year's end. The Zend Core PHP development and production platform is aimed at developers using the popular PHP language for developing Web applications. IBM offers Zend developers two IBM database options: DB2 for heavy workloads and the lightweight, Java-based Derby database (formerly Cloudscape), which IBM donated last year to The Apache Software Foundation.

IBM has demonstrated Viper with some software partners but had few enterprise users testing it. It is now beta-testing the software with 40 users.

Further details about Viper and registration for the beta program are available on IBM's Web site at www.ibm.com/db2/xml/.