Five Important Items from IOD 2009

Attending all the sessions at the IBM Information on Demand conference is impossible, but attending the right DB2 training presentation to get the most out your time is vital.  Not every conference is important, but with money tight and the economy questionable, learning and staying ahead of the pack with DB2 education is critical.  While attending the different sessions and talking to my various friends and contacts last week, five important items or themes ran through all the conversations.

First, DB2 for z/OS continues to do the majority of the work.

Everyone talks about how DB2 for z/OS continues to get more systems, databases and applications pushed onto it.  These might not be new systems, but systems consolidated from the last merger or systems consolidated from the UNIX distributed environment to a zLinux environment. Even though the mainframe continues to do the majority of businesses transactions, it continues to be challenged by new or naïve management that has never touched a mainframe and does not realize it is the most secure, scalable, energy cost efficient and reliable environment within their IT infrastructure.

Second, IT costs are under scrutiny.

More concentration is focusing on the cost of IT within the business and the business is tired of projects that fail, development backlogs and over budget ongoing project costs.  The business is looking at the total cost to the business for running the system, cost per transactions and overall cost of the system for its functionality.  I believe this is good for everybody as it makes us all drive the costs of IT down.  Some businesses are getting so frustrated that they are outsourcing their entire IT operations and only developing new projects.  I heard of one company that was consolidating its many distributed systems into a zLinux mainframe environment.  This was projected to save the businesses $6.5 million over five years.

Third, DB2 for LUW is replacing Oracle.

The DB2 V9.7 for Linux, UNIX and windows with its Oracle compatibility is handling huge, yes huge, number of Oracle licenses.  The conversion from Oracle to DB2 v9.7 for LUW is fast, easy and costs tremendously less.  The Oracle licensing, support, and performance problems are finally catching up to it and business is converting their systems to DB2.

Forth, DB2 pureScale is performance superstar.

The IBM LUW developers took the critical components of the DB2 data sharing coupling facility and integrated it into DB2 pureScale to handle all the locking, buffer pool and communications of many DB2 systems.  This provides extreme DB2 performance, scalability and reliability.  The IBM lab DB2 performance analysts are thoroughly impressed scaling their performance environment out to 118 DB2 LUW members with linear scalability.

The fifth item is that DB2 V9 for z/OS is solid.

In the sessions that I attended where they took a survey of the crowd, greater than 50% of the people have DB2 V9 installed and in New Function Mode.  In addition, some of my friends at some of the biggest shops in the country already have DB2 9 installed, running in production and in New Function Mode.  There have been minor glitches within reordered row format and exotic use of other new functions but DB2 V9 is very ready for everyone with proper maintenance and testing procedures.

Also, thank you all for the kind words regarding my blog.  I appreciate the feedback, especially topic ideas and noticing the work involved.

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