Tuesday, June 22, 2010

SSacSA - A typical IBM acronym, but not the typical product (Move from Sybase to DB2)

When I first heard about SSacSA (it's part of the new features in DB2 9.7 FP 2), I thought that this is another typical IBM acronym I had to learn. But when I looked closer at it, and it stands for DB2 SQL Skin Feature 1.0 for applications compatible with Sybase ASE (what a name for itself!), I wasn't scared of the long name and its acronym anymore. The biggest reason is that this feature is very useful and can save customers lots of money.

With this SQL skin (it's on the very outside of the DB2 engine, in the JDBC layer) it is possible to take applications written against Sybase ASE and let them run against DB2 without too much migration effort. The trick is that SQL statements written in the Sybase dialect are caught in the JDBC driver and rewritten to DB2's version of the SQL language. The statements can then be executed in DB2 and the application doesn't notice it is now running on top of DB2.

A chat with the lab (cwtl?) is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd, to discuss this new offering. You can register here.