5 Reasons Why DB2 Is Still the Best Big Data Solution

The race is on among all the vendors to lock your new Big Data project in to their architecture, platform, and support contracts.  All the open source Hadoop derivatives have boiled down to the leaders of Cloudera Impala, Teradata SQL-H, EMC Pivotal (formerly GreenPlum) MongoDB, and one of best–IBM’s BigSQL.

All of these vendor’s solutions are great at leveraging the data refining and discovery aspects of Big Data.  In the Big Data gold rush the vendors neglect to let you know about the integration difficulties, huge data storage expenses, and the massive number of servers needed.  Given these many considerations for the other platforms, DB2 z/OS and the new DB2 LUW BLU technologies are still the best for your Big Data project and here are 5 powerful money points as to why that’s true. Make sure to get these into your Big Data platform discussion.

1. Already have the infrastructure.  When your new Big Data project gets underway you’ll need a few things like a job scheduler, programming skills, performance monitor, and all your production procedures to name just a few.  Developing a full new infrastructure takes time and implementing it is even more time consuming.  Leveraging your existing infrastructure saves time and money. Also, by incorporating Big Data into your existing infrastructure more of your coworkers will support your Big Data project.
2. Incremental cost is nothing and getting cheaper.  Eliminating the startup costs and using an existing environment is always cheaper.  Even in the mainframe DB2 z/OS environment a new project and workload can result in huge savings on capacity and software licensing through IBM’s Value Unit Edition (VUE).  Leveraging the capacity within the environment with the cheap z/OS zIIP, and zAAP facilities works out very nicely for all workloads and seasonal peaks.  With the addition of the new small inexpensive IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) box, the IDAA capabilities let everyone get their query answers fast.
3. Any programming language, any data type, and any data store.  When I blogged about Curt Cotner’s farewell retirement speech at IDUG North America 2013, I highlighted the new data stores coming into the DB2 Family.  The announcement was big then and bigger now as the DB2 Family– DB2 11 for z/OS, and DB2 LUW 10.5 (the BLU Acceleration release)–embrace the Key Value Data Store, Document Data Store, Columnar Data Store, and Graph Data Store.  These new data stores represent the flexible, ever increasing number of data stores that the DB2 Family continues to embrace.  DB2 11 supports all these new data types, their interfaces and their new associated programming languages.  By incorporating support for these into the DB2 Family your existing stable DB2 environment provides all types of integration possibilities with other existing projects and infrastructures.
4. Full featured security.  DB2 security and protection of PII data, incorporating encryption, and data masking across the DB2 Family are state of the art and the envy of the database industry.  Data access security continues to be a weak link for all the Hadoop implementations.  While Hadoop continues to do security development work, it is years behind the industry and light years behind the DB2 Family.
5. DB2 is already integrated.  Integration into your complex environment is difficult.  Getting data management, data transfers, disaster recovery, and database monitoring tools set up for a new environment is not easy and takes time.  It is always better to work on the end business goals instead of infrastructure.  Exchanging DB2 data, integrating with DB2, and leveraging DB2 tools and complex capabilities help speed Big Data business answers.

These are only five reasons why using DB2 as your Big Data platform is the best choice. DB2 continues to be the leader for more than these five reasons. By focusing on the Big Data business task instead of the infrastructure, success can be achieved more cheaply, quickly, and easier by leveraging your existing DB2 environment.

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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, 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.
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I will present twice at the International DB2 Users Group in Barcelona.  The first presentation will be talking more about Big Data design considerations, the new BLU technology, Hadoop considerations, UNION ALL Views and Materialized Query Tables during my presentation at the International DB2 Users Group IDUG EMEA conference in Barcelona, Spain, October 13-17, 2013.  My speech is Wednesday October 16th at 9:45 “Data Warehouse Designs for Big Data” in the Montjuic room.

This presentation details the designing, prototyping and implementing a 22+ billion row data warehouse in only six months using an agile development methodology.  This complex analytics big data warehouse architecture took processes for this federal government agency from 37 hours to seconds.  For more information on the conference go to www.idug.org.

The second presentation is “Agile Data Performance and Design Techniques” Tuesday October 15, at 16:30-17:30.  Would you like to have enough time to look at all the DB2 database performance options and design alternatives?  In this presentation you will learn how Agile application development techniques can help you, your architects, and developers get the optimum database performance and design.

Learn how Agile development techniques can quickly get you to the best database design.  This presentation will take you through the Agile continuous iterations with releases that reflect the strategy of optimum database design and application performance.  Using these techniques you and your developers will be able to uncover the performance considerations early and resolve them without slowing down the Agile time boxing processes and incremental development schedule.  For more information on the conference go to www.idug.org.

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I will also be presenting at the Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas November 3-7, 2013.  I will be presenting “Big Data Disaster Recovery Performance” Wednesday November 6, at 3 pm in the Mandalay Bay North Convention Center – Banyan D.

This presentation will detail the latest techniques and design architectures to provide the best Big Data disaster recovery performance.  The various hardware and software techniques will be discussed highlighting the Flash Copy and replication procedures critical to Big Data systems these days.