As I talked about cloud computing and big data over the last couple of weeks the comments have been active and great. Please keep the comments coming. First, let me make myself perfectly clear: yes, I am a cynic and data management is critical to all aspects of IT. Being cynical of any new situation is especially important when trying any new processing models and cloud computing and big data are the newest models.
Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google and many other companies are living cloud computing and big data every day. In fact I’ve helped some of my large data warehouse clients process billions of rows in only minutes through their data warehouse systems. Those might be considered big data. But big data is more than large data stores. It’s about analytics over huge amounts of data. It is about researching the deep business questions and issues. DB2 with Hadoop is a wonderful combination and it is great for these types of analytics. Also DB2 with Hadoop is just another example of IBM supporting and leveraging the open source community and everyone benefiting from it.
Big data and cloud computing are more than the big numbers of data records and the time sharing aspect of cloud computing. Like the introduction of the internet, cloud computing and big data represent a new way to handle processing problems such as the need to have elastic computing resources that scale to infinity and beyond. Or the need to do analytics against all the years of medical records to find the best treatment. The new cloud computing and big data models provide new wonderful opportunities to say, “yes” to the business. The options cloud computing and big data provide are also very cheap as these types of solutions can be provisioned on an as needed basis and leverage cheap computing models that only bill for what you use. Now you can finally get free maintenance and accountability for an open system UNIX or Windows system. Can you get any processing cost accounting from your in house UNIX systems?
So yes, I am cynical about all the cloud computing and big data special advertising sections and airport banners. These claims are backed up by early successes by data management and technical professionals that took the time to analyze the issues and design, build and process properly through this new model. Also DB2 and hopefully soon DB2 Hadoop are available on the Amazon cloud for your new production system. Put something in the schedule and budget now so your data management department can lead the way through this new cloud computing and big data model. More information can be found about how cheap it is from Amazon and IBM . Start your cloud computing and big data experiments and lead your company into this new computing model. Better to lead then have someone else dictate the efforts where you can document all the performance, recovery, availability and scalability areas and help your CIO answer the cloud computing and big data special advertising section expectations.
I am speaking at the upcoming Baltimore Washington DC DB2 Users group meeting September 14th where I will be presenting “DB2 Performance Database Discoveries and Recommendations Part 2.” The new meeting agenda information should be posted soon but more information can be found at: http://www.bwdb2ug.org/index.htm
Coming up Sept. 29th DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training and 30th SQL Performance Training two great DB2 classes are being offered in Washington DC: Sept. 29th DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training and 30th SQL Performance Training. Get more information here (http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training/)
Also remember the IDUG EU conference in Prague, this November and join all the discussions on DB2 performance, cloud computing, big data and more. Sign up now at www.idug.org.
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