It looks like IBM is serious about attracting the best of the new technology. They have just announced the release of “DB2 Version 10”, the First Big Upgrade in Four Years. The company has also updated its InfoSphere data warehouse software. Both products are faster and work more efficiently, claims IBM. DB2 can cut storage space requirements by up to 90 percent, and InfoSphere can execute queries up to 10 times faster than before, according to IBM.

But the most important features are the following: DB2 can now work with the World Wide Web Consortium’s RDF (Resource Description Framework) data format. InfoSphere can now communicate with Apache Hadoop deployments. While IBM is still one of the dinosaurs of the tech-world, it looks it is awakening and adapting faster then other players to the new trends.

DB2 version 10 can be downloaded at no cost for production environments that require no more than two processor cores and 2GB of memory. This might be very interesting for test projects, but the price for larger implementations starts at US$6,180 (including a year of support).