4 Reasons to Consolidate Databases to DB2 LUW

As year-end budgets get finalized, and 2015 is planned out, you might want to reconsider your plans and look to consolidate any other database vendors into DB2 LUW.  Substituting database vendors within projects is not the huge task it once was because of standard SQL, SQL PL, stored procedures, and other data access object layers as such as Hibernate and others.  These standard components provide an easy way to change the DBMS to DB2. It can be much easier than you think.

1. First, DB2 is industry leader in compatibility to the ANSII SQL standards.  IBM DB2 has migration toolkits that help discover, classify, and help migrate to the new DB2 LUW platform.  ANSII SQL standards have been in place for a long time, and DB2 is 99% compatible with Oracle and other DBMSs.  DBMS migrations to DB2 have been happening for several years, and since DB2 Version 9, so many system migrations successes can be referenced for many different types of applications.
   
   Changing and standardizing the DBMS to DB2 provides many huge benefits.  Extra time, diverse practices, and alternate skills needed to support these other DBMS systems go away.  Additional time and effort applying maintenance, along with the extra downtime caused by emergencies these other DBMSs experience compared to the DB2 environments are eliminated.  The cost to the business of these non-DB2 emergencies only continue to be more expensive and more aggravating for everyone affected as time goes on.
   
   
2. The price of vendor maintenance and support contracts, especially Oracle’s, are continuing to go up.  Your database licensing agreement might be the standard five-year agreement with price increase maximums built in.  If your company is coming up on that five-year renegotiation be prepared for a big shock.  The price increases are going up dramatically and features that were once included in the standard contract are now addition feature charges.  Most vendor’s contract legal agreements prevent talking specifics, but be prepared for big increases from even the open source support vendors for all your Big Data and cloud efforts.
   
   
3. Other DBMSs scalability only goes so far.  The economy has grown fortunately and this year business is booming for the Christmas holiday.  Unfortunately, for some of the other DBMSs, scalability issues are causing problems and downtime is costing some business millions.  DB2 continues to offer the best scalability in the industry through the DB2 family and DB2 pureScale that I talked about a while back here.  Also the new additions to the DB2 family of IDAA and DB2 BLU Acceleration scalability continues to amaze many, especially the results of SAP and PeopleSoft implementations with their query completion speed and overall storage savings.
   
   Within the DB2 LUW Cancun release, DB2 BLU Acceleration Columnar tables are supported through the DB2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR).  Supporting HADR provides a variety of disaster recovery standby options: having a synced hot standby system for immediate failover, having multiple standby systems, or a variety of other HADR configurations.  These disaster recovery options are great and are especially important for the new DB2 BLU columnar reporting tables.
   
   
4. DB2 BLU OLTP transaction tables are backed up by the new BLU shadow tables, providing a solution for all types of workloads.  This dual-table configuration provides an OLTP table for transactions that are then made available through its shadow columnar table.  This dual-table design supports extraordinary performance, spreads workload to the best solution, and provides excellent response time for all types of workloads.  Through the ability to have columnar tables mirror the transactional tables, your OLTP processes isolate their locking operations while the report processes go against the DB2 BLU shadow-columnar tables that answer all types of report queries with lightning fast speed.

Watch your performance, scalability, availability and the contract renewal costs of these other systems to determine the best time to try HADR or DB2 BLU Acceleration shadow tables for your next project, and consolidate your workloads to DB2 LUW.

Dave Beulke is a system strategist, application architect, and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, and President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs.