Complexity Isn’t Necessary, or Occam was Right

Willard C. Cole – Competitive Sales Specialist,Information Management, IBM

I have spent a lifetime in IT hiding the complexity of environments from my users.  When they’re sitting comfortably in front of their screens, they don’t need to know what we’ve done to build that environment any more than just how their car works.  In fact, it’s in their best interest that they don’t.

I feel the same way about clustering systems.  Over the years, there have been numerous forms of clustering available to us.  Think about the System 360 and all its successors, including the System Z.  They’re all just clusters of processors doing specialized tasks.  It’s that model we should emulate when we talk about clustering distributed systems.  While it can seem to be magic, it’s not.  It may be very complex at some level,  but we need not expose that complexity to the world.

And that’s why I think DB2 pureScale is the best clustering solution available.  It is simple, easy to use and you can understand it without spending two weeks with the development team.  No special hardware considerations.  No asking the experts for the best software, hardware and network combinations.  No additional complex software.  Just create your database with the pureScale option and you are in business.

For all that, you can have a pureScale cluster that’s exactly one system wide.  Why,you ask? Easy.  You’re not paying any penalty (or dollars) for the option and it gives you that comfy cushion knowing you can add a second or third node at any time for patching , platform maintenance -or to handle some ad hoc load.  Just start up that second node, make sure you’re in sync and you’re ready to go.  Simple!  Makes you look like a genius to management with all that forethought.  It’s not a choice of active-active or active-passive.  It’s a choice you can make when you need to.  You don’t worry about the directions to Dallas unless you’re going to Dallas, right?  But you’ve got that map app handy just in case.  Same thing here.

I spent more than a decade building and tuning clusters with competing software.  That was a struggle.  The complexity was never hidden.  Instead, it was – and is – viewed as a litmus test of your technical acumen ability.  Can’t understand it?  That’s your fault!  Only the cognoscenti need apply.  It requires that you understand not only the database, but how the operating systems deals with the database, network & disk, how the disk subsystem works, and how the network is configured and what that means to the overall environment.  Phew!  And the required system setup is now considered a gigantic security risk, without an answer.

And then there was tuning and troubleshooting.  Let me tell you it wasn’t easy.  Those activities will turn your hair white. And the answers most often lie with applications using the cluster.  Change the application to be cluster aware.  Really?!  Then the application isn’t actually portable.  Why did a node crash?  It was a network or disk blip within one of the nodes.  Really?  How do you know?  I just know.  Trust me…….  See what I mean?  (I’ve had those very conversations.  It’s uncomfortable for everyone.)

pureScale doesn’t require any of that magic.  It’s built on the proven principles we’ve used for years on System Z.  Even Larry Ellison thinks it’s cool technology.  Interesting endorsement, eh?   pureScale simply requires that you create the database with the proper option and DB2 takes care of the rest.  There’s no magical heartbeat to worry about.  No disk communications issues.  Better yet, there’s no additional software to install, manage and patch.  It’s just DB2.  What could be easier?

What about performance tuning?  DB2 pureScale for LUW scales almost linearly.  First, there are no application changes required.  If the application runs well on a single node, it will probably run just as well on multiple nodes.  Unlike other systems, pureScale is aware that it’s running in a cluster environment so it makes intelligent choices about optimizing queries and using buffer pages.  The autonomics built into the database monitor the activity and make adjustments on the fly.  Better adjustments than we’ll ever be able to make, too.

What about node failures?  Clusters aren’t immune to nodes failing – or being failed.  It’s how the environment prepares for and handles the failure that counts.  pureScale won’t lose transactions due to most types of node failures.  It won’t take hours to re-establish connections and recover the database state.  It knows the state of transactions and locks and blocks globally so the recovery is within a few heartbeats.  The world doesn’t stop while the system recovers.

So what does Occam have to do with this?  Remember what Occam’s razor stands for – I’m paraphrasing here – The simplest solution is the best.  I like that.  It appeals to the couch potato in me.  The geek in me argues about it.  After four decades in IT, I’ve come to treasure simplicity where I can find it.  Or make it.  Or hide it.  Being the “little man behind the curtain” isn’t comfortable.  DB2 pureScale for LUW gives you Occam’s simplicity.  After all, you’ve got an enterprise to keep running.  Let the database manage itself so you can make those contributions to your enterprise.  It’s much more rewarding than reading through countless screens of pointless performance stats.

An exciting new accelerator for analytics : the DB2 Technology preview

Dr. Jon A. Lind, Infosphere Warehouse Product Manager, IBM

Businesses are dealing with more and more data coming from a wide range of sources each and every day. At the same time, businesses are being challenged to react even faster to changing market conditions and customer demands. Being able to analyze this ever growing data volume and deliver actionable insight to the business is putting traditional warehousing solutions to the test. Combining this with a growing importance to put analytics in the hands of decision makers across the enterprise, it becomes easy to understand why business intelligence and analytics are a key concern of leaders today.

Over the last few years, IBM research and development has been investigating technologies within the warehousing landscape that would be able to help businesses address their data and analytics challenges. From exploring parallel processing execution across an exploding number of cores or how to exploit memory over an ever increasing memory demand, or defining methods to fully utilize the capabilities of modern processor, IBM continues to push research and development forward by the demands of business and economy.
Within the database arena, IBM has been focused on advances in columnar storage, query optimization techniques, and compression technologies. In the analytics space, IBM has been researching to understand the unique characteristics and techniques utilized by analytical applications to query the data repository and then optimize for those query patterns.

The years of research have culminated into the latest DB2 Technology Preview. This DB2 Technology Preview shows how a revolutionary combination of columnar data store, hardware and database optimization techniques will deliver a quantum leap forward in the abilities of DB2 as the backbone to supplying analytics across the enterprise. The focus is not just on the implementation of a column data store, but the implementation of a warehouse data management solution that optimizes all areas necessary to drive huge performance gains to business intelligence.

DB2 Technology Preview:
This DB2 Technology Preview is an exciting new accelerator for analytics. Featuring a column store for tables providing not only fantastic performance but storage savings due to the column store architecture and extreme compression algorithms. This new technology that has been developed by IBM and integrated directly into the DB2 engine. The DB2 Technology Preview introduces the use of column-organized tables as a direct part of the DB2 engine and DDL. This is not a bolt-on technology nor is it a separate analytic engine that sits outside of DB2. Much like when IBM added XML data as a first class object within the database along with all the storage and processing enhancements that came with XML, column organized tables are integrated into the storage and processing engine of DB2.
In conjunction with this new type of data store, the DB2 technology preview will showcase improved performance, updated storage savings features and a new design paradigm to simplify the implementation and management of DB2. This allows the DB2 technology preview to deliver on these performance and storage innovations while also optimizing the use of main-memory, improving I/O efficiency and exploiting CPU instructions and characteristics to enhance the value derived from your database investments.

A key value of this technology is the storage savings. By design virtue, columnar storage is able to provide significant storage savings over current compression technologies. This provides savings on disk for the base tables and also provides savings for backups. Compression, however, is not the only storage benefit. The DB2 technology preview show cases how you no longer require auxiliary performance structures like indexes, materialized views/materialized query tables (MQTs), multi dimensional clustered tables (MDCs), etc, to gain superior performance.

Lower cost of operational analytics :
• Reduces the number of objects that need to be deployed to achieve the required level of performance saving time and effort.
• Designed with simplicity in mind, for faster deployment and immediate execution of the technology.
• Reduces the cost and time of performance tuning for analytical workloads by removing the requirement of data structures such as indices.
• Does not require scale out technology to achieve required performance, leverages existing hardware or single server deployments to deliver the performance of larger clusters.

To find out more about managing big data, join IBM for a free Big Data Event

Is Your Database Ready for Big Data?

Chris Eaton, Technical Specialist, IBM

A lot of people think of Big Data as simply Hadoop. But it’s so much more than that.

IBM, for example, has an entire Big Data Platform which covers analytics on data at rest like with Hadoop,  in-databases analytics, and analytics on data in motion with streaming analysis. One way to think about Big Data is that it is a “tool” to increase the IQ of your company. There is data that you already have in house and also data flowing through your corporate systems (much of which you simply throw away today) which could be leveraged to make your company smarter – Smarter about your system behavior (availability of your services to your clients for example), smarter about your clients buying behavior and even smarter about how much influence some of your clients currently have on others in their social circles (some of whom may not currently be your clients).

So where do databases fit in today and into the future?  Of course they are an integral part of the big data platform. Currently you store shiny gold nuggets of information in your relational databases. You have spent time transforming the data in your relational systems to make sure they have integrity and consistency. Most would consider that relational data has a high value per byte (compared to a Hadoop or a streaming solution wherein much of the data has low value per byte, but in aggregate is very valuable data).

So what’s on the horizon and is your database ready?  As more and more data is analyzed in real time, there is and will be a need to store this data in a richer format (shine it up, so to speak). This means  that there will be an increasing need for databases to ingest vast amounts of data in real time and on the other side for databases to be able to perform analysis of larger and large quantities of data in seconds, not minutes or hours.

You may have seen in DB2 10, a new INGEST utility to more efficiently handle continuous data feeding into the database. What about the query side? Well, certainly DB2 DPF can handle massive amounts of data today leveraging the power of large scale out clustering (much like Hadoop divides and conquers big data problems with lots of parallelism). But what about those cases where the amount of data isn’t so huge that I need a scale out solution but the analysis needs to be done in real time? There are lots of niche and not so niche vendors out there looking at in-memory techniques for speeding up queries; but most of them require the data to be sucked out of the database system and stored in repositories that are much less flexible (sometimes needing to store everything in-memory, which can be very inflexible).

It seems to me that this high speed in-memory analytics, especially for line of business type workloads will take off in the next several years faster than we have seen it in the past. Giving line of business users the power to analyze large quantities of data in real time without having to force IT build one-off repositories, I think, is only going to grow. The flexibility of in database merged with in-memory analytics will give IT the ability to leverage existing database assets and therefore build line of business solutions much faster.
So, keep your eyes on this space and make sure you’re on a path to exploit your existing databases and thereby make your company smarter.

To find out more about managing big data, join IBM for a free event: http://ibm.co/BigDataEvent

The Expanded Role of the Database in the New Era of Big Data

Bernie Spang, Director, Strategy and Marketing, Database Software and Solutions, IBM

Big data is all about scaling the use of data beyond the norms of the current era of information technology.

You could reasonably argue that the first big data era began more than a half-century ago. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the U.S. Congress in which he declared the goal of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to Earth.  The amount of data generated and managed throughout the program quickly outgrew data systems of the time.  A brand new “Information Management Sys-tem” (IMS) was created by IBM and other members of the Apollo team to tackle this new big data challenge.

Now, fast forward more than 50 years and we have ushered in a new era of big data, ignited by the global “Internet of things,” mobile, social and cloud computing, and instrumented systems of all kinds.  Now every transaction, tweet or meter reading has potential value to enhance or destroy a customer relationship; to drive a new business opportunity; or to catch a bad guy.   New types of data systems are needed to handle more data and more types of data, faster and more cost effectively than systems that were state of the art just a few years ago.

The key to making big data work for business is using systems that are designed for workload optimized performance and simplicity.  In some cases that means completely new systems to handle challenges like analyzing data in motion, or spreading complex work among a large number of distributed systems.  In other cases, new capabilities are added to proven systems such as IBM DB2 and Informix, to provide a new mix of production grade capabilities – e.g., for both SQL and NoSQL databases.

Solving today’s big data challenges often requires combining the structured, optimized approach of traditional database systems with the less structured, exploratory approach of new systems.   In fact, modern versions of technology created decades ago may be the best choice for new enterprise challenges; ones that also benefit from their time-proven stability, maturity, and manageability.

So what’s the role of a relational data system in this big data era? 

Some IT professionals may take relational and pre-relational database technologies for granted, but they remain the trusty workhorse in most data centers.  These proven platforms continue to handle the growing volume of data and faster transactions from applications that conduct business every second of every day.   They also enable deep analysis of that data to help organizations make better decisions with the speed needed to affect business operations as they execute.

Organizations leading the pack in big data ingenuity are the ones using the best combination of systems – traditional or new – for each need.  For many organizations building complex systems, running global banking networks, or delivering millions of packages around the world everyday, that includes using the modern descendent of the data system that played a small role in a giant leap for mankind.

Look for more thoughts about Big Data at the speed of business from me and other followers of database technology in the coming weeks.

To find out more about managing big data, join IBM for a free event
http://ibm.co/BigDataEvent

IBM PureData System for Transactions

Kelly Schlamb, DB2 pureScale Specialist, IBM

By now, I’m hoping that all of you have had the opportunity to hear or see something about IBM’s latest addition to the PureSystems family – the PureData System.  Generally available in October 2012, this new system comes in three different models that have been designed and optimized to handle the different types of workloads that your organization typically needs to run: transactional analytics, and operational analytics.

If you have seen something on PureData before now, you have likely seen the following things mentioned:  built-in expertise, integration by design, and simplified experience. There’s a lot of great information out there talking to these points (and I’ll provide some links below) so I won’t spend too much time on them. However, a key take away is that these systems are “simple”.  That means simple to order, setup, configure, manage, upgrade, etc. These systems are hardware/software integrated, shipped in the rack, fully assembled and they just need to be powered on and connected into your corporate network.  Deployment is hours, not days.

Having a DB2 pureScale background, the system I’m personally the most interested in is the PureData System for Transactions… a platform that provides transactional data services, with DB2 pureScale at the heart of it.  For those of you who aren’t aware, pureScale is the DB2 feature that provides extreme scalability and availability in a shared data environment.  It could just be my background, but I think it’s very cool technology.

In a previous role I was actually one of the pureScale developers and development managers, but in my current role I’m now working directly with clients who are in the process of bringing pureScale into their IT infrastructure.  This has given me a unique opportunity to both work with this technology at a low bits and bytes level, but then also see first hand how clients are using it to power their core business applications.  And now with the new PureData System for Transactions, I’m really excited about how it is going to open up further opportunities for our clients who need this type of extreme availability, but perhaps were a bit hesitant to take on the task of standing up a pureScale system themselves.

The PureData System is designed to significantly improve the time to value for new application deployments because the system is already pre-configured and tuned for OLTP workloads. I was recently at the Information on Demand 2012 conference in Las Vegas and there was a lot of buzz around all of this. I had a lot of conversations with folks who were very excited about getting their hands on one of these new boxes.  They told me that more and more of their applications are becoming business critical and high availability has become a necessity.

For more information on the PureData System for Transactions, check out the following pages and videos:

IBM PureData System for Transactions

IBM PureData Systems

IBM PureData System for Transactions Tour with Tim Vincent :

IBM PureData System for Transactions :

Before signing off, I just wanted to quickly share a quote I saw in an article – just to highlight the kinds of things that analysts are saying. The analyst here says that the new solutions will enforce Big Blue’s current market and thought-leadership position: “That isn’t a bad thing, unless you happen to be one of the myriad companies traveling in IBM’s wake… But over time, we expect PureData and future IBM solutions to inspire what amounts to a template for what enterprises will come to expect from transaction processing and business analytics solutions.”

Mobile Devices settle Stormy Waters

George Farr, Senior product manager, IM Mobile strategy and delivery, IBM

Watching mobile devices at work during the recent devastation that hurricane Sandy unleashed on the Eastern US seaboard was remarkable at best. The term SMEM (social media in emergency management) was erected and will likely be a term used going forward into disaster recovery. Social networks, with the mobile device at its core, turned into lifelines, emergency rescue tools and for some, just peace of mind that loved ones and neighbours were ok. And while the devastation reigned large and lingered for days, the ability to communicate and connect made some of Sandy bearable. To a degree, life could move on and things could get done, amidst the chaos.

Now, take that scenario and apply it to business. Surely, thousands of databases went down, power outages were rampant and prolonged. But this is where the mobile device helps organizations keep things moving at somewhat of an acceptable pace during crisis mode. This is actually technology that IBM offers with the IBM Mobile Database and is an example of the way organizations today structure their data and communications planning to ensure ‘mobile’ is readily available. Having mobile applications accessible to employees, to help ensure everyday business runs smoothly is key. And now in times of crisis, as in the case of Sandy, to ensure things can just keep chugging along.

IBM Mobile Database is a new database offering for Android mobile devices. It is a light weight database that runs on Android. It offers a tight integration between a customer’s mobile solution and their existing DB2 or Informix environment. The new offering makes it easier for mobile developers to develop and assemble applications for Android devices. Together with the solidDB offering, IBM Mobile Database provides the capability to synchronize data with DB2 and Informix databases.

The reality of today’s organizations is that employees are mobile now almost by nature. This technology allow customers to be able to use the Database in disconnected mode, in other words while not connected to the server or their enterprise database, or anywhere near it for that matter. They can then replicate to their servers at a later time. This technology also comes with state of the art security to protect their data from any intruders.

Enterprise organizations are being given the same opportunities to leverage mobile technology in the same way consumers started doing a decade ago. It’s cheap, and in the case of IBM’s technology, it’s free! Why free? IBM is committed to enhancing the value proposition for DB2/Informix. This product gives a well-rounded and complete solution for our Enterprise customers who want to have mobility as part of their solution. And IBM believes this is a technology that organizations cannot afford not to have.

Check out these links for more information.

• Download your free copy
• Or, if you want to start writing your android code, here are few links to get you started.

Scroll down for a closer look at the technology behind IBM Mobile Database

Stay connected!

George

George Farr has been a tester, developer, team leader, technical planner, development manager, solution manager, and World wide Market manager for IBM Power tools & compilers.  Most recently George has assumed the World Wide Information Management senior product manager role for Mobile strategy and delivery.
George is an award-winning speaker and prolific author of articles on Power system. He holds a specialized honors degree in computer science and mathematics from York University in Toronto. He’s the author of many books, which includes “Java for RPG Programmer,” “Java for S/390 and AS/400 COBOL Programmers” and “ILE: A First Look” and “RPG IV by Example.”

The major highlights include:

·   Persistent data storage

·   Transactional storage also during connection loss

·   Automatic recovery

·   Fast and reliable access to enterprise data offline

·   Data security

·   Built-in replication capabilities allowing synchronization with IBM databases

·   Full-featured relational DB with standard SQL API, procedures, triggers

·   6 MB footprint zero admin database to fit on mobile devices

·   Flexible options such as partitioning data or creating views to customize data for each device or user

Best Practices in One Place for DB2ers!

Any executive and seasoned manager knows recreating the wheel makes no sense, especially when great best practices are available to learn and leverage in your own business environment.  Best practices make your job easier and can help you achieve your business goals more efficiently. Great leaders listen to techniques that work with other customers and seek out valuable knowledge directly from the experts.  That’s why IBM has launched a new IBM Information Management Best Practices portal.

The portal is the new home to IBM Information Management best practices, and extends the existing sites from IBM developerWorks.

The portal connects you to best practice communities for a variety of IBM Information Management products, including:

DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (including InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM Smart Analytics System, DB2 pureScale)
DB2 for z/OS
InfoSphere Master Data Management
InfoSphere Information Server
IMS
with more products joining us in upcoming months.

The best practice papers, technical presentations, and videos published in each community cover a wide range of topics to help you plan, design, implement, tune, and monitor your solutions so they perform at their best in your environments, potentially saving you time and resources.  The best practices are written and tested by IBM technical experts who work in the development and quality assurance teams that created the product features, and who work with customers like you to determine the best ways to efficiently use Information Management products in real world environments.

The best practices portal is also a great vehicle for you to share your experiences and opinions about our best practices, to help us improve them and publish new ones that answer your needs. You can join any or all of the best practice communities to be able to rank best practices and leave comments on any of them. You can also easily share best practices with your friends and colleagues on a variety of social media.

Come visit us and let us know what you like and what you need!

The DB2 Guys

I Love Seeing the Looks on their Faces…

Steve Astorino, Program Director, DB2 LUW – User Technology

Think about this. You have your entire IT team running around trying to figure out how to speed up your DBMS. You are working crazy hours to tune this parameter and that parameter so that you can get some minuscule performance improvement, which in the grand scheme of things, seems to make almost no difference to your customers’ experience of your product or services. You feel good about having spent so many weeks, months and so many resources to get this little improvement…I have seen this happen over and over again…This is when I say STOP!! You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. Just because you have been using the same DBMS for the last ten years, it doesn’t mean it’s the right one for you.

I know users who have seen multiple times performance gains on their system by moving to DB2. Don’t lower your expectations to meet the performance of your DBMS. Instead, raise your DBMS’ performance to meet your expectations and your customer’s expectations. DB2 does exactly that!! When showing off DB2 to customers, I love seeing the looks on their faces when they observe these results. It’s pure shock. I know what they are asking themselves…Why didn’t we switch to DB2 before? And by the way the cost of moving to DB2 is very small compared to the ongoing cost and lack of performance you currently experience.

DB2 10.1 has even better features which drive your performance through the roof. There are significant performance improvements:

Enhanced query performance for a range of common SQL statements
Intra-partition parallelism improvements better utilize multi-core processors
Improved performance of star schema based queries
Improved query performance through more efficient data prefetching
Improved query performance on tables with composite indexes
Statistical views improve the accuracy of cost estimation for queries with predicates containing expressions
Runstats now supports index sampling
SQL compiler registry variables can now be set for a specific SQL statement or application
Enhanced memory sharing on large POWER7 systems running AIX

I was working with a customer recently and here is what they shared: after we switched to DB2 we got 44% performance improvement for batch/reporting processes, 71% improvement for backup jobs and 25% lower query response time….

A different customer shares: one of the standard SAP programs go from 30+ hours down to 2 hours, a 93% increase in performance.

Forget the minuscule 1% or 2% improvement!! And also think about the cost savings that would come along with these performance gains…

See some of the related published material.

Which distributed edition of DB2 9.7 is right for you?

Licensing distributed DB2 9.7 servers in a high availability (HA) environment

Compare the distributed DB2 9.7 database servers

Steven Astorino, BSc – Computer Science is a Program Director of DB2 Development overseeing Information Development, User Experience and DB2 Development. He has many years of experience in Databases including DB2 as well real time Database Replication. He began his career as a developer and has held a vast range of roles from software development and quality assurance to information development and user experience. Early in his career, Steven has spent several years working with network testing technologies for the Telecom Industry and played a key role in providing VoIP testing solutions. High quality, efficiency and customer focus are amongst his highest goals and directives to ensure outstanding customer satisfaction and experience.You can reach him at: astorino@ca.ibm.com.

DB2 Advantages Over Oracle in Compression

Chris Eaton, Technical Specialist, IBM

I have previously posted about compression and the new adaptive compression capabilities in DB2 10. In this posting I want to clearly articulate why DB2 is the leader in compression capabilities and how this translates into big savings for clients along with big performance gains for database workloads.

What is compression and what’s available in DB2?

No matter what form of compression we look at, they all work on the same basic premise which is to find repeating patterns in larger amounts of data and replace those repeating patterns with smaller symbols. That’s compression in a nutshell. The algorithm that delivers the best compression is the one that can find the most repeating patterns. However, for databases you have to weigh the cost of finding and replacing patterns against the benefits of smaller objects. With DB2 we leverage a number of different techniques to find the most patterns to compress out while at the same time actually improving performance.

How do we use more CPU to compress/decompress yet get better performance?

DB2 has the most compression algorithms to offer of any DBMS vendor with 2 algorithms for table compression, 3 for index compression, 2 for temporary table compression and 1 for log archive and backup compression. The beauty of the DB2 10 solution is that you as a user don’t pick the algorithms; DB2 looks at the data, decides on the best way to compress the data and presto, smaller tables, indexes, temporary objects and log files. With compression on tables in the range of 7x the objects are significantly smaller than they are uncompressed so every I/O brings in seven times more rows into memory and every GB of memory has seven times more rows packed in there (because DB2 keeps rows compressed in memory and on disk). By doing up to 7 times fewer I/Os we actually are seeing large performance boosts at most clients and yes we use more CPU to do that but most clients don’t run their Linux, UNIX or Windows servers at 100% CPU utilization all the time. Quite on the contrary, most are sitting at around 40% utilization and so there is lots of CPU to accommodate the 5-7% higher compression/decompression requirements where as I/O bandwidth is at a premium. So compression is a win/win.

What sets DB2 apart?

As I mentioned we have a lot of algorithms to leverage to find the most patterns. In fact, compared to Oracle 11gR2 we have a huge advantage. The reason is that Oracle (and Microsoft as well as Sybase) all use what is called a page level dictionary looking for repeating patterns only on a 4k, 8k, 16k or 32k data page. Where as with DB2 we use a page level approach but also a global table level scan for repeating patterns. This 2 level compression approach in DB2 means we find more patterns and therefore get better compression. Let me end off with an analogy. How many people in the department you work in have a birth date of June 15?  I would bet that the vast majority of readers of this blog do not share my birth date (of June 15).   But how many people on the planet share the same birthday as me?  Millions I’m sure.  Why?  Because if I only look at a small amount of data (1 page worth) I’m not likely to find the same repeating patterns that I would find if I looked at a much larger set of data (a table worth or a planet worth).  Since DB2 does both we deliver superior compression and improved performance.

Tune in to this webcast this week for more on compression.  

Look for more of my blogs at Toolbox.

Chris Eaton is a worldwide technical specialist for IBM’s Information Management products focused on Database Technology, Information Governance and Workload Optimization.Chris has been working with DB2 on the Linux, UNIX, and Windows platform for over 19 years. He is the author of several books in the data management space and is an international award winning speaker.

Welcome to The DB2 Guys!

Welcome to The DB2 Guys, your source for expert opinion on everything DB2! These veteran ‘DB2ers’ share their unique but, yes, independent ideas on DB2 and the industry in general. While the guys are all IBMers, this blog is intended for customers, buyers and all practitioners who need to learn, understand, and compare database solutions. In a Big Data world we need to fully maximize the benefits of these solutions to more aggressively impact the bottom line.  The DB2 Guys bring you knowledge paired with objectivity. Join in the conversation by sending in your comments.