The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

DB2 Deployment Scenarios

According to research published by the IDC in August 2003, IBM's DB2 enjoys a 33.6% share of the RDBMS market. What I find strange, though, is that in all my years working in security and performing network and application assessments I've come across DB2 only three times, whereas other RDBMS such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and mysql are ubiquitous. This suggests that either the DB2 figures from IDC are wrong, which I doubt, or that DB2 boxes are deployed so far back into the typical organization's network that I just haven't been given the jobs that look in those particular areas. In discussions with other people working in the same field, their experiences are the same. We all agree that DB2 must be out there, but where exactly “there” is we're just not quite sure. Needless to say, after people have read this I'll probably have a score of DB2 pros mail me and point me in the right direction. Of those three instances in which I have come across DB2 deployed in the wild, two were hanging off the back of an application running on IBM's WebSphere and the third was integrated with Tivoli. From this one could guess that the common deployment scenario for DB2 would be in conjunction with another, or multiple, IBM products — but this is of course just a guess. Because I just don't have enough raw data in this area, rather than waste time with supposition and theory on DB2 deployment scenarios, let's move on to examine DB2 on a less macro level; we can be ...