EXPERT RESPONSE
One of the biggest impacts of DB2 V8 will be the requirement to be running a zSeries machine and z/OS v1.3 -- DB2 V8 will not support old hardware nor will it support OS/390. Additionally, DB2 customers must migrate to V7 before converting to V8. There will be no IBM-supported capability to jump from V6 (or an older version) directly to V8 without first migrating to V7.
Owing to these architectural requirements, DB2 V8 will have the ability to support large virtual memory. This next version of DB2 will be able to surmount the limitation of 2GB real storage that was imposed due to S/390's 31-bit addressing. Theoretically, with 64-bit addressing DB2 could have up to 16 exabytes of virtual storage addressability to be used by a single DB2 address space. Now there is some room for growth!
So, DB2 V8 will exploit 64 bits and, over time, that will make things faster and more efficient. In the short term you will see things like the ability to parse, optimize and execute SQL statements up to 2MB in size that should get rid of many of those pesky "SQL statement too complex" errors (you may know it as SQLCODE -101).
Many other limits are being eliminated, as well. DB2 V8 delivers large object names, expanded partitioning, new types of partitioned indexes, improved partition management and more.
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