Big Blue has launched a new database technology dubbed pureScale. The move which puts a spoiler on rival Oracle's OpenWorld conference next week, is aimed at sucking up more customers in the transaction processing.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was expected to have lots of jibes at IBM’s database capability as it touts integrated Exadata hardware-database systems with its to-be-acquired Sun Microsystems. But it is a bit trickier if IBM have a new product that front runs Oracle a bit.

PureScale was designed by IBM’s Toronto software lab and its Power Systems lab in Austin. IBM said its architecture allows customers to add and remove processing power by adding servers while only paying for the software they need for peak workloads.

It is similar to Oracle’s Exadata effort.IBM said that DB2 pureScale improved productivity by more than 80 percent in a test with 100 Power servers. It does this by cutting the communications within the system to lower computing power.

DB2 pureScale will be available on Power 550 Express and Power 595 systems in December.