DB2 in Domino
Scott Prager's demonstration I mentioned a moment ago was of a working prototype of Domino 7, with an optional feature of storage of Notes data in DB2. It appears, for this prototype at least, that this is optional on a per-database level. The DB2 storage replaces the actual .NSF file, while Domino still uses the internal .NSF facilities and APIs to get at the data. So the whole Domino application runs unchanged but the physical storage is handled by DB2. There is actually no .NSF file. You should still be able to replicate or copy the database, and I would speculate that when that happens, if the target doesn't have DB2 or that option is not selected, that the target is translated back to a .NSF file.

In the initial release at least, the DB2 will be an integral part of Domino, but again, maybe in the future it will be possible to leverage an existing DB2, say, on a mainframe. One thing that's true is that being DB2, it'll to be fast. The plan is for the DB2 install to be no-touch. It gets installed with the server, and Domino and the DB2 between them manage all the DB2 aspects of database management. That will be just like the DB2 that's installed as part of Discovery Server. And it will be at no extra license cost, with the proviso that the DB2 may only be used for Domino's .NSF data. So administrators won't have to learn DB2 administration to be able to use it.

But Domino developers should at least learn to use SQL (Structured Query Language), because they will be able to get at the data directly via SQL. Actually, access to the data like this will still be managed by Domino so that ACLs (Access Control Lists) are honored. You won't be able to bypass Reader and Author field values if the data are checked, and data will be displayed or updated only if the user has access to that data. All this means that you can write Lotuscript code or even non-Notes programs to access the Notes data directly. Think of reporting and statistical analysis of the data. Think of joining Notes databases together in SQL selects.

And what's more, you will be able to create views in Domino Designer where the view selection is actually an SQL statement and the view is populated with the result set every time it's needed. The view index isn't stored. Click on an entry in the view, and you get the document displayed, as expected. And it's quick. In the demo, it was opening--creating, actually--such a view on a 7500-document database practically instantaneously. And yet more, such views could be joins of multiple databases, or even Notes and non-Notes data, though here it's not clear what will happen when you click on the document.

What else?
So what else happened at Lotusphere? Quite a bit. For more of my Lotusphere musings, check out my article, "Making the rounds at Lotusphere 2003," elsewhere in this issue of DominoPower.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.