Empowering your AI and cloud data journey with IBM Db2 12.1.2

We’re excited to announce the latest release of IBM Db2 12.1.2, packed with new features designed to unlock the full potential of your data and drive the next generation of AI and cloud applications. With advancements in security, scalability and support for cutting-edge workloads, Db2 continues to be a powerful, flexible database solution for businesses across industries.

Here’s a quick look at six of the standout enhancements in this release:

Db2 12.1.2 introduces built-in support for vectorized data, a game-changer for AI applications. The new vector data type allows you to store and manage vector data alongside traditional scalar data, enabling fast, efficient similarity searches. This makes it easier to power advanced AI applications, like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) or recommendation systems, all within your trusted Db2 environment.

The optimized SQL queries with vector distance metrics facilitate seamless integration of structured and unstructured data, enhancing the ability to perform similarity searches. Users can build their queries using familiar SQL syntax and built-in functions to easily incorporate vector data. Additionally, the similarity search allows for extending the result set beyond exact matches, unlocking information from contextually relevant data points. Seamless integration of structured and unstructured data provides richer insights and ultimately improving decision making and productivity using AI applications.

Db2’s pureScale feature, which ensures high availability and scalability, is now enhanced with a few key upgrades:

• Support for low-latency network interfaces with the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on AWS EC2 instances, designed to optimize performance for demanding workloads.

• pureScale on zLinux with sockets is now supported for users on IBM Z and LinuxONE servers, bringing more cost-efficient configurations for read-only workloads, development environments and high-availability setups.

• zVM support for greater flexibility in virtualizing zLinux environments, optimizing hardware usage across pureScale deployments.

Db2 12.1.2 adds several security enhancements to help you keep pace with evolving compliance standards while keeping your data safe:

• World-writeable permissions on Db2 files and directories can now be restricted, giving administrators more granular control over who can write to critical files.

• TLS encryption monitoring improvements allow you to track the impact of encryption on performance, so you can optimize your network and security settings more effectively.

• New “Mask at Read” functionality for column masks prevents sensitive data from being inferred during queries, adding another layer of protection for your most valuable information.

Db2's remote storage capability now includes support for Azure BLOB storage. Users running Db2 on Azure cloud have support for external tables, utilities like backup, load utilities and log archival. Additionally, Db2 Warehouse instances running in Azure can now use Azure binary large object (BLOB) storage to support Native Cloud Object Storage (NCOS) tablespaces, unlocking the benefits of high resiliency and lower cost that come with Azure BLOB object storage for storing columnar data.

Db2 continues to evolve with support for open data formats. In version 12.1.2, it rounds out full support for CRUD (create, read, update and delete) operations on Apache Iceberg data lake tables. It empowers users to easily manage, and update data stored in distributed systems, ensuring your lake of data remains agile and up to date.

Db2 12.1.2.0 brings your database into the future with innovations that support AI, improve cloud performance and enhance security—all while maintaining the reliability and scalability you expect from Db2. As you continue to evolve your data architecture, this release provides the tools you need to stay ahead of the curve.

Stay tuned for the general availability of Db2 version 12.1.2 on 5 June 2025 and explore the full potential of Db2.

Bookmark this link to download the latest IBM Db2 Community version on 5 June 2025