For years, Lotus Domino has provided flexible data storage using "self-describing" documents. This has allowed developers to add and remove fields from document types on the fly. Each document stored within a Domino database contains a list of fields and their values.

Domino Designer combines visual form design with a data definition tool that allows you to update the fields stored within a document type throughout the lifetime of the application. This often tempts developers to create tables of fields within a form. In a relational word this may seem sacrilege, but in Notes/Domino development, this is more often than not considered acceptable.

Domino 7 DB2 integration is a new feature (currently offered via "Limited Availability"; see the note below) that provides the opportunity to close the gap between document-centric Notes/Domino and relational, SQL-based DB2. It allows you to bring the scalability features of DB2 and the flexibility of SQL into...