If no major issues pop up, the DB2 beta will start wednesday. The DB2 driver, templates and DQE will work on any DB2 version 7.x or higher and will use the .NET provider shipped with DB2 UDB. If you don't have this provider but do have a valid DB2 license, consult IBM for this native .NET provider. The provider is also shipped with the personal edition of DB2 UDB 8.1.x.

The only things not supported on DB2 are: - table aliasses - user defined types (same as oracle)

The beta is live!

Support forum: http://www.llblgen.com/tinyforum/Threads.aspx?ForumID=20&SectionID=2 Get the driver from the drivers section in the customer area.

It depends on how many customers can participate in this beta, so it might be that we open up this beta to the public also.

Otis wrote:

It depends on how many customers can participate in this beta, so it might be that we open up this beta to the public also.

Fantastic! We are using DB2 for a client but have not yet converted them to our .NET solution (we were either waiting for you to release a DB2 driver or else convince our customer to switch to SQLServer to simplify all of our lives ).

At this point, I don't think I'll have much time to spend trying out the driver. It may take me a few weeks and a few deadlines hit before I can muster some available time. But thanks again for the availability of the driver.

I haven't looked into the DB2 .NET provider at all yet. Are you suggesting that we could install the provider from say the personal edition and that driver will work with a 7.2 backend? (excluding any licensing issues). Its just that it may be hard to get our client to upgrade from 7.2 to the latest to get the provider. If the provider can work with older versions then that's great.

takb wrote:

Otis wrote:

It depends on how many customers can participate in this beta, so it might be that we open up this beta to the public also.

Fantastic! We are using DB2 for a client but have not yet converted them to our .NET solution (we were either waiting for you to release a DB2 driver or else convince our customer to switch to SQLServer to simplify all of our lives ).

Heh Well the DB2 database is the most powerful database I've ever seen, but IBM does a very lousy job supplying the proper tools and documentation to work with the database...

At this point, I don't think I'll have much time to spend trying out the driver. It may take me a few weeks and a few deadlines hit before I can muster some available time. But thanks again for the availability of the driver.

I didn't expect a lot of customers having access to DB2 so I'll make it a public beta next week, together with the DataDirect version of the Oracle driver.

I haven't looked into the DB2 .NET provider at all yet. Are you suggesting that we could install the provider from say the personal edition and that driver will work with a 7.2 backend? (excluding any licensing issues). Its just that it may be hard to get our client to upgrade from 7.2 to the latest to get the provider. If the provider can work with older versions then that's great.

Yes, that should be possible. The personal edition installs the client and the .NET driver and according to the docs it should work with 7.x as well This is also so lame of IBM: you can't download the .NET driver. I'm considering a DataDirect version of the DB2 driver as well. The sad thing is: I can't get a connection with OleDB. It simply doesn't work. Very weird.

Today Oracle's DataDirect powered driver is also released as beta and available for download for customers (will be merged into the demo tomorrow as well ).

The DataDirect driver has as advantage that it doesn't require a client to be installed, it connects directly to the oracle database. It is not a free provider however.

Writing the driver I found some bottlenecks in the Oracle driver for ODP.NET (as it uses OleDb for some things and I had to rewrite these for the datadirect version to use vanilla Oracle views/tables) and I hope to backport some of the fixes to the oracle drivers soon.