Licensing and pricing
Use DB2 Express-C at no charge to build, deploy, and distribute database applications. Consequently, there are no license fees associated with this DB2 package. The code is, however, optimized in such a way that it throttles the DB2 engine to a maximum of 2 cores of processing power for the database on any-sized server or virtualization session.
You must also restrict DB2 10.5 to 16 GB of memory per server or virtualization session. For example, if you installed DB2 Express-C on a server that had 8 VMWare sessions, each configured with 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM, each copy of DB2 Express-C will schedule work on only 2 cores and the full 16 GB of RAM in each virtualization session. However, you could not install a copy of DB2 Express-C in a VMWare session with 20 GB of RAM, because that exceeds the 16-GB limit, unless you manually configured DB2 to use 16 GB of memory or less.
Finally, you cannot exceed 15 TB of user data in a DB2 Express-C database.