Category Archives: DB2 for z/OS

IBM Announces DB2 10 for z/OS

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Larry Ellison is not prone to praising his competitors. So it was quite startling when he recently opined that “the IBM DB2 product on mainframe is a good product.” Of course, DB2 for z/OS is the undisputed leader in the RDBMS market when it comes to total system availability, scalability, security, and reliability. And today IBM officially announced a new major release of DB2 for z/OS.

DB2 10 for z/OS has garnered some great reaction from its most popular Beta program ever. Some Beta participants claimed that this is the best release in a decade. Here is why:

  • CPU cycle reductions for most workloads.
    While versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 actually increased CPU times by a small amount, version 10 reduces them. After rebinding to DB2 10, most customers should see a 5%-10% CPU reduction out-of-the-box. Some will see even further reductions in CPU cycles.
  • Support for up to 10x more concurrent users.
    With DB2 10, virtual storage improvements are delivering up to 10 times more concurrent active threads. This allows many customers to reduce the number of DB2 members needed to support their workloads, resulting in net CPU and memory savings and improving application performance.
  • New temporal capabilities built directly into the database.
    DB2 10 delivers the industry’s first integrated bitemporal capabilities that are built directly into the database. This allows for queries over past, present, or future time periods. But the key thing to remember is that these bitemporal capabilities are provided by the core database engine. This means that you don’t have to maintain separate custom code to get these capabilities. You simply code SQL against the main table. DB2 for z/OS is the first RDBMS to deliver this!

Here are some quotes from Beta participants:

“We measured a 38% reduction in CPU for heavy insert workloads in a data sharing environment. That’s a significant savings which provides immediate business benefit.”―Peter Paetsch, BMW

“In addition to the cost savings, DB2 10 for z/OS offers a far superior data server environment than Oracle Database”—Manuel Gomez Burrierl, CECA

“We expect to reduce our data sharing requirements by 25%, which means less system, storage and resource.”―Banco do Brasil

There are many, many additional reasons to move to DB2 10. You can read about them at IBM – Announcing DB2 10 for z/OS.

Winning Entry in the "Do You DB2?" Contest

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The Independent DB2 User Group (IDUG) recently ran a contest called Do You DB2? where DB2 users were encouraged to share their experiences. I’d like to congratulate Michael Krafick of Atlanta, GA who won the Grand Prize of a 55″ internet-ready HDTV for describing his organization’s experiences with IBM Smarter Systems. Here are some excerpts from his story:


…a database with multiple partitions over three nodes. Initially performing well, we soon discovered that predicted monthly growth for the database was grossly underestimated. Performance and trending were showing that we were going to run into a problem sooner rather than later.

Not to mention, this was a data mart supporting Business Intelligence in a financial market. We were heading into that special time of year where the planets align – where month end loads, quarter end loads, and year end loads were about to collide.

… This is where IBM’s Balanced Warehouse methodology comes in to save the day… We would extend our cluster out by one more BCU to give us some more horsepower… The result was incredible. Here is just a taste of what we saw:

  • Our CPU utilization saw a 50% drop. Where we had consistently ran at 95% utilized (spiking to 100%) we dropped to an average of 45% utilized.
  • We were able to increase our workload by 10% compared to the month before (2077 Report Views over 1935 Report Views).
  • Even with the additional increase in workload, we decreased our execution time by 50% (Original Execution Time- 357 Hours, New Execution Time – 210 Hours).

Essentially, our reports were flying and the client immediately came back “raving” over our speed. Our hard work had paid off and the DBA’s released a huge sigh of relief. There is a real feeling of accomplishment when you win one for the team.

Congratulations Michael!

The DB2 Story

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I thought I’d take a few moments to share a couple of links with you. They are links to stories that appeared a couple of years ago about the history of DB2.

If you work with DB2 or relational databases in general, they make for very interesting reading. Here’s a great quote from the Information Week article…

At first, relational database was a highly mocked product, halting in its performance compared to the programmed-path systems. Skeptics like John Cullinane, founder of Cullinet Software, once took this reporter aside to instruct him that relational database would never amount to anything compared to his firm’s IDMS product. Last year, relational database represented an $18.6 billion a year market, according to IDC.

If you know of other good links, please share.

Exciting New Contest for DB2 Users

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If you are a DB2 user in North America, make sure to check out the new contest over at the International DB2 User Group (IDUG). The contest is called Do you DB2? and includes prizes like a WiFi-enabled HD TV and exciting new Apple iPads. To enter simply tell IDUG exactly why you love working with DB2 in less than 1,000 words. The stories will be judged based upon originality of the content, efficacy of expression, and the use of proof points. It doesn’t matter what your scope or nature of experience with DB2 is, as long as your stories are memorable and unique you have a great chance to win.

Here are some sample topics that you could write about:

  • Usability, Performance, Scalability or High Availability of DB2
  • Features: Deep Compression, SQL compatibility, pureXML, security, autonomics
  • Cost or risk of migrating from another database vendor to DB2
  • Experience with the DB2 maintenance and support given by IBM
  • Proof points on why DB2 is the best database software
  • Stories about the reach and value of DB2’s worldwide community, forums, events or education

Make sure to get your entries in soon, as the deadline for entries is in June.

IDUG Conference in Tampa on May 10-14

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If you are a DB2 user, you probably already know that the International DB2 User Group (IDUG) offers the best DB2 conferences. These user-run conferences offer the largest number and widest range of sessions about DB2. In fact, there are more than 100 sessions about DB2 at the upcoming IDUG conference in Tampa, Florida on 10-14 May, 2010. This year, for the first time, IDUG has added the extremely popular Hands-On Labs that IBM has been offering at the Information on Demand Conferences for a number of years. Also, don’t forget about the FREE IBM certifications that are available to conference attendees. And, of course, there are lots of great opportunities to get to know other DB2 users like yourself. You can register for the conference at the IDUG Web site. There are even tips for justifying conference attendance to your manager.

DB2 for LUW and DB2 for z/OS are Converging

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As many of you know, the features and functions in the mainframe version of DB2 (DB2 for z/OS) and the distributed version (DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows) have been converging for a number of years.

These two flavors of DB2 now share much of the same SQL syntax. You can read the details in SQL Reference for Cross-Platform Development. There are some differences in syntax, because the platforms – hardware and software – have different strengths, and the SQL is tailored to take advantages of those strengths to deliver the best performance, scalability, availability, and security on each platform. However, the differences in syntax are being minimized, and are the exception rather than the rule.

The drivers, services, and tooling have also been converging. The Data Studio tooling provides common services for all platforms, allowing you to easily administer DB2 across all platforms.

Also, features like native XML data management (pureXML), clustering (pureScale), and compression (Deep Compression) use similar architectures and algorithms across both of these flavors of DB2. For instance, pureScale on Unix uses the same architecture and approach as the Data Sharing technology in Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. And, of course, the Data Sharing technology is recognized as the most effective and efficient scale-out architecture in the industry. Similarly, IBM recently brought compression techniques from the mainframe to Linux, Unix, and Windows to even further stretch that flavor of DB2′s lead in storage optimization on distributed systems.

So, while these two flavors of DB2 are not identical, they are coming closer together from both a feature and a function point-of-view. Their interfaces are also converging, and currently share a high degree of commonality. This convergence is making it easier for many organizations who use both flavors of DB2 to re-use their DB2 skills on the other platform. I have had numerous conversations with DB2 for z/OS users who have easily picked up DB2 for LUW skills, and I am happy to let you know that this will become even easier as we move forward, and this convergence continues in future releases of DB2.

For another perspective on how the mainframe and distributed versions of DB2 are converging, and for my inspiration for this blog post, see the DB2 Technology Converging article in the IDUG Solutions Journal.

Are Larry Ellison and Oracle out of Touch with the Market?

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Larry Ellison was his usual entertaining self on yesterday’s Webcast announcing the Oracle/Sun strategy. However, some of his statements were so far from reality that it left me wondering if he knows what’s happening in the database market. For instance, he crowed “the Oracle Database scales out, IBM DB2 for Unix does not. Let me see, how many servers can IBM put together for an OLTP application? Let’s see, how many can they group together? Um, one. They can have up to one server attacking really big jobs. When they need more capacity, they make that server bigger. And then they take the old server out, put a bigger one in. And when you’ve got the biggest server, that’s it. That’s all the can do for OLTP“. Actually Larry, you couldn’t be more wrong. DB2 pureScale supports up to 128 nodes. And, not only that, but IBM has published scale-out numbers for DB2 pureScale, something that we would love to see Oracle provide for Real Application Clusters (RAC).

He also claimed that DB2 “can’t scale out, they can’t do cloud, they can’t do clusters, the can’t do any of this“. The fact is, DB2 offers both pureScale (using a shared-disk architecture) and DPF (using a shared-nothing architecture). This allows users to choose the approach that best suits their environment. Oracle, on the other hand, offers only a shared-disk RAC architecture. Some might argue that Exadata simulates a form of shared-nothing backend for Oracle. However, this is essentially a band-aid that attempts to address scalability issues by throwing more hardware at the problem.

As regards whether DB2 can do the cloud, many people would argue that a shared-nothing architecture like DB2 DPF is the best approach for private clouds. Also, don’t forget that DB2 already has multiple cloud offerings in the marketplace, including DB2 on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Finally Larry claimed that “you would’ve thought, years ago, that IBM would have come out with a database machine. I mean its so obvious, they’ve got hardware, they’ve got DB2. Why in the world didn’t they come out with a database machine? It’s fascinating“. Actually, IBM has come out with such an offering. IBM has been doing this since we introduced the Balanced Warehouse to the market in 2007. The most recent examples of such systems that IBM has brought to market include DB2 pureScale and the IBM Smart Analytics System (which includes the entire stack needed for analytics, from hardware through ETL, warehousing, reporting, and analytics).

I really am astonished that Larry Ellison would make such fundamental factual errors on such a prominent Webcast.

Want to go to Rome?

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This year the European IBM Information on Demand (IOD) conference is in Rome, Italy. It runs from 19 May to 21 May 2010 in the Marriot Park Hotel. To learn more about the conference, see the IBM Information on Demand EMEA Conference Web site.

IBM is currently accepting proposals for speaking sessions at the conference. IBM is particularly interested in securing DB2 users to speak. If you are a DB2 user and have something interesting to share, please submit a proposal. Interesting topics include sharing your experiences with a particular DB2 feature, best practices you observed when working with DB2, or literally anything else that you think other potential DB2 users can benefit from hearing. To submit a proposal, go to the Call for Speakers Web page.