Conor O'Mahony's Database Diary

Today, IBM announced DB2 pureScale. I thought I’d take a few moments to tell you about DB2 pureScale. The first thing you should be aware of is that DB2 pureScale is the culmination of a multiple-year collaboration between the IBM DB2 and IBM Power Systems teams. Some people may initially think that this announcement is a reaction to recent publicity stunts from Oracle Corporation. But when you dig beneath the surface, you will discover that this is a tremendous piece of technology.

As you know, DB2 on System z is the industry gold standard for scalability, availability, and reliability. Nothing comes close to DB2 for z/OS. However, there are organizations who are not taking advantage of the unique capabilities of IBM System z. Often, such organizations have turned to database clusters on distributed systems, like Oracle RAC, to achieve their scalability and availability goals. If your organization attempted to use Oracle RAC, you are only too aware of the issues involved in deploying and updating RAC systems.

DB2 pureScale directly addresses these issues. For some time now, clients have been telling IBM that they need an easier solution for adding capacity to transactional systems. They want to get away from having to specially tune their database systems for use in clusters and from having to make their applications cluster-aware. DB2 pureScale directly addresses these issues by providing application transparency. With DB2 pureScale, you can easily add or remove nodes. You don’t need to re-tune the database systems or update your application code.

Not only is DB2 pureScale much easier to work with, but it also offers higher levels of availability and it offers greater levels of efficiency when adding capacity to your system. Higher levels of availability are made possible by adopting a design with 15 years of proven leadership on System z. These innovations basically ensure that more data is available to your applications for greater amounts of time, when compared with solutions from other vendors. The key to the increased levels of efficiency are the unique architecture and the use of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) calls, which are much more efficient that IP-based calls.

Here is a link to a short video interview where I talk about DB2 pureScale:

If you want to get more information about DB2 pureScale, make sure to watch the upcoming DB2 Chat with the Labs Webcast on the 21st of October. This Webcast will feature experts from the IBM labs who will dive into the technical details of DB2 pureScale. They will explain the architecture and how the RDMA calls are so much more efficient.