Janet Perna, general manager of data management solutions for IBM Software Group, says the company does not believe that all information will ever be in one place, and that it will be important to give companies the ability to shield information complexity and its location with integration middleware. IBM database should be the obvious choice for all new eXtensible Markup Language (XML) applications that will be written, says Perna. Therefore, IBM will add XML support to the IBM DB2 Universal Database RDBMS wrapped around new indexing abilities. An arrival date for the new technology is not available, and it might be part of an integrated DB2 upgrade or a standalone product. To reach maximum XML performance, DB2 Universal Database will have stronger indexing attributes that will allow advanced functions and more filtering. IBM will also add support for XPath and XQuery data and XQuery data models. Therefore, users will be able to create views that use SQL and XQuery by sending the protocol through DB2's query optimizer for a unified query plan. A spokesman for The Research Libraries Group has said his organization, which uses XML to store bibliographic data, will benefit from native XML support enhancements in DB2 because digital records will be stored in a preparsed form for streamlined and more efficient searches. Oracle has also said its Database 10g 2 will have support for XQuery access to XML data, and Microsoft will add native XML data type and corresponding data structures to query support in Microsoft SQL Server 2005.