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March 1996
/
Letters
/ DB2 Pricing
While your November 1995 review
"Enterprise Database Managers"
was fair, accurate, and thorough, the comparison chart of features and prices on page 216 was not accurate. The correct suggested retail pricing for 50 users for IBM's DB2 2.1 is $91.40 per user (server with five licenses, $1495; five-user entitlement, $359; four 10-user entitlements, $679 each). In addition, IBM's DB2 does offer row locking, which was not properly indicated in the chart. Also, you state
that DB2 for AIX "has relatively little third-party support." IBM has listed in its solutions catalog more than 440 applications available for DB2 on AIX from 254 vendors, with support growing at a rate of more than 200 percent per year.
Tim Negris
Vice President, Sales and Solutions Marketing
IBM informed us that the price of the DB2 server had changed from $1995 to $1495 as we finished the review. While that change was reflected in the Product Information summary, it was not incorporated into the chart, which should have shown a per-user cost of $106. We were not informed at the time of further reductions in client prices. We also reported an incorrect price for Microsoft SQL Server; we should have indicated a per-user cost of $145. To be fair, we've also learned that Oracle recently changed the price of Workgroup Server 7.1 to $295 per concurrent connection and eliminated the per-server fee.
The reference to page locking came from the DB2 technical documentation; we reported what we found there. While support for DB2 for AIX is growing, it lacks the breadth of third-party support that Oracle for AIX enjoys.--Barry Nance, consulting editor
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DB2 Pricing
