According to his profile on it.toolbox.com, Lewis Cunningham is an “Oracle ACE, Database Architect and self-professed database geek”. Many people know Lewis as an influential influential voice in the database world. A couple of days ago, Lewis blogged about PL/SQL Anonymous Blocks (in DB2 9.7). For those of you who are not aware, DB2 9.7—which was released a few months ago—supports the most commonly used PL/SQL syntax. In fact, PL/SQL support in DB2 is just the tip of the iceberg. The following table describes some of the new features in DB2 9.7.
| Oracle Database Feature | DB2 9.7 Support |
|---|---|
| Concurrency control | Native support |
| Data types | Native support |
| SQL dialect | Native support |
| PL/SQL | Native support |
| PL/SQL packages | Native support |
| Built-in packages | Native support |
| JDBC client with extensions | Native support |
| SQL*Plus scripts | Native support |
You can get more details about these new features at DB2 9.7: Run Oracle applications on DB2 9.7 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows on the IBM developerWorks Web site.
Several hundred organizations were part of the Beta testing for these new features. We got some great feedback from them. Here is a small selection of that feedback:
DB2′s PL/SQL compatibility is excellent. We’re looking forward to integrating the current dual source code base into a single one. This will increase our development and testing productivity. In addition, SQL compatibility is significantly improved. We ran an Oracle-version program ‘as is’ on DB2, and the test result was better than we expected. The compatibility level that DB2 9.7 achieved is amazing.
—Masahiko Kudo, Works Applications (Japan)
The IBM DB2 9.7 compatibility is amazing — and there are no queries or DB2-specific code in our applications! Everything is compatible with Oracle and DB2 9.7.
—Gene Ostrovsky, VP Research and Development, ExactCost
As a migration specialist, the new DB2 9.7 PL/SQL compatibility features help Oracle users migrate to DB2 seamlessly. These features drastically reduce the time required for migration efforts and significantly lower overall costs. The custom Perl scripts and defined manual workarounds, which I previously relied on for database porting services, are now obsolete. DB2 9.7 allows native support of PL/SQL, weak typing, enhanced locking methods and a vast array of other features designed to make database migration virtually effortless.
—Axel Puerner, Puerner Unternehmensberatung