I am not allowed to tell you

Do you know this feeling when you already know what is coming and you are not supposed to talk about? You already found THE perfect birthday gift for your loved one and are eager to tell her or him without telling details. Or you know about what's inside the wrapping and want to actually see it and have to wait for another two hours.

IBM is offering the DB2 Technology Sandbox, a preview of what is most likely coming in the next release of DB2. On the website there are only vague hints of what is coming, including the following ones:

• “Fast Enable” - 90% less effort to move to DB2:
  • Leverage your existing staff and skills.
• Save even more with deep compression:
  • Multiple algorithms for automatic index compression.
  • Automatic compression for temporary tables.
  • Intelligent compression of large objects and XML.
• Gain business intelligence from your XML data.

In my role as DB2 developer I have been working on some of the features and as advocate I am already working with some customers and I even gave briefings about it. Anyway I am not allowed to tell you more about it. It's the same feeling as described above. The good thing is you don't have to wait for the gift to be unwrapped. You can apply to take a sneak peek at it. What's even better is that you can gain a competitive advantage because you are prepared and know how to leverage the new technology once it's generally available.