At next week’s LinuxWorld conference in New York, IBM will show off the upcoming 64-bit version of its DB2 database for Linux, enhancing clustering and scalability capabilities and providing a port to non-Intel boxes.

Heading the list of improvements will be a Linux-based
DB2 partition adviser for automating cluster management, said Gary Schneider, director of Linux business development at IBM. It allows database managers to optimize the performance of databases running over multiple machines without manual intervention, cutting the time for the task from weeks to hours.

The company will also port DB2 to run under Linux on the high end pSeries Unix machine in order to appeal to users of heavy duty clusters and boost the performance of the database. Previously, 64-bit Linux was only offered on Intel-based machines. And IBM says it will be the first database vendor to support the newly completed 2.6 Linux kernel.

Preview code will be available to developers from January 21.

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