Is there an equivalent setting for IBM DB2 9.7 as there is for SQL Server 2008? The parameter is READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT which can be set to ON and apparently affects locking.
Somewhat equivalent would be to set the database configuration parameter CUR_COMMIT ("currently committed") to ON, however, this does not eliminate locks completely. It does eliminate lock waits though, as queries, instead of waiting on exclusive locks, will fetch previously committed versions of the locked rows.