Tuesday, April 19, 2011

DB2 9.7 FP4 is out: Trigger support has been enhanced and some other goodies

A new fixpack 4 is now available for DB2 9.7. An overview of new features and enhancements is on the Information Center. Many of the enhancements are designed to make migration from other database systems, namely Oracle, simpler, saving even more on migration costs.

What stands out from my perspective, are the enhancements to the trigger functionality. Now you can lump the definition of update, delete, and insert triggers together into a single DDL statement. Speaking of statement, support for statement triggers that fire only once per execution has been added to DB2's PL/SQL functionality, too.

Many of you will like (pun intended!) a new LIKE feature. It is now possible to use a column reference as pattern expression, i.e., to look up the actual pattern in a different table.

Note that the fixpack has already been upload and the Information Center been updated. However, it seems that the fix list overview page and the fixpack summary page still need to be updated.