IBM's (and Oracle's) plans for U2 users

Briefing Note I recently had a briefing with IBM during which the subject of the future of Informix users came up, writes Phil Howard. The answer to that question is well known: IBM will continue to maintain and upgrade the Informix database for the foreseeable future but, in the longer term, IBM expects to provide migration capability to DB2.

Mostly as an aside I also asked what plans the company had for its U2 databases, which it also acquired when it bought Informix. The answer was that it had no specific plans as the U2 databases use fundamentally different technologies from DB2. I thought this answer a little odd but did not pursue the matter.

I had better explain what the U2 databases are and how they are different. The U2 databases consist of UniVerse and Unidata (hence U2), which were originally developed by VMark and Unidata respectively. Subsequently, the two companies merged to become Ardent Software and this in turn was bought by Informix, primarily for the company's DataStage ETL (extract, transform and load) tool.

The article continues at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/29457.html