Introducing SQL Data Insights Pro

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IBM Research has made SQL Data Insights Pro (SQL DI Pro) generally available as of March 2026, targeting enterprises running Db2 for z/OS — the mission-critical mainframe RDBMS trusted by large financial institutions, insurers, and government agencies. The core proposition: AI inference moves inside the database itself, so sensitive data never leaves the mainframe to reach external analytics pipelines or cloud AI services. SQL DI Pro extends traditional SQL from syntax-based querying to AI-driven pattern discovery. Practical capabilities include similarity detection across business entities (finding related customers, accounts, or transactions), anomaly detection in enterprise transaction data, and semantic analysis of unstructured text fields — customer notes, claims records, compliance documents — alongside structured relational data. The technology builds on the earlier SQL Data Insights (SQL DI), which introduced vector embeddings for structured relational rows. SQL DI Pro adds semantic understanding of free-form text, which IBM describes as carrying 'a substantial portion of valuable information' in enterprise workloads — fields too large, sparse, or linguistically complex for traditional SQL predicates. The data sovereignty angle is the primary differentiator. As regulatory requirements tighten in financial services and healthcare, the ability to run AI without moving data to external systems addresses compliance risk directly. IBM Research frames this as 'AI and data systems integration' — the first product of what they expect to be a broader research program.