IBM continues to transform DB2 from a database-management system into a data-management system with the introduction of DB2 Information Integrator (II) 8.1. This feature provides enterprises with a universal database to integrate and access multiple data types distributed across databases and file and message stores.

Users will access II 8.1 with standard SQL definitions and expressions using typical database queries or Web clients. In the future, IBM will support XQuery and XML to send queries and to retrieve data through Web services, and to format such data appropriately for a variety of end user devices. This will meet the goals of II's developers, who collaborated under IBM's Xperanto Project to provide a uniform way to unite enterprise digital assets regardless of their location. But will it meet enterprise goals for content management and delivery?

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Organizations have a lot of choice in content management and delivery products that manage and search enterprise content. II 8.1 will have to prove its mettle to work with structured, semistructured and unstructured data outside DB2--and it will have to show it can deliver the data using this case, then indeed, all data can be managed by a database.

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