Traveling to different clients throughout the years as a DB2 consultant and seeing different database designs, development methodologies and tools being used provides some interesting technological perspectives. The complex nature of technology can muddy the issues within the business. Even as new buzzwords of cloud computing, Web 2.0 and other technologies come onto the horizon, it’s still the standard performance, reliability availability and scalability (RAS) that continues to be most important.
Performance, plain and simple, through straight-forward data processing applications continues to be paramount for everyone. Amazon with its recent 4-day outage (http://money.cnn.com/… ) detailed in this article in April and their recent Lady Gaga meltdown (http://www.datanews.info/…) provides additional cloud paradigm doubts. These performance and RAS cloud issues along with its huge energy appetite detailed recently in Forbes (http://blogs.forbes.com/markpmills/…) show some of the true costs of the cloud infrastructure that will surely be passed on to customers as time and budgets are fully realized and documented. Whatever your company uses for its technology these considerations continue to support the major importance of good old standards of performance and RAS for your technology environment. They also support the huge power efficiencies of the new z196 mainframe running at only a fraction of server farms of equal MIPs. No wonder everyone is consolidating their servers since they can run any Java workload on the mainframe and not need the coal burning cloud.
Next as Oracle gets sued again, you would think they can manage and install their own software or did the large number of tables, interfaces and inter-product connections of their monstrously complex products do them in.? Read the lawsuit details here (http://www.informationweek.com/news/…), and think about the issues as Oracle begins to force companies to migrate from their DB2 implementations to an Oracle database implementation and licensing contracts. Imagine your database design standards and see if any of your current designs have the thousands of tables that these Oracle applications have in them. I’ve seen a lot of systems over the years and the simple truth is straight-forward application design, minimizing the number of moving parts is better and usually provides the best performance and RAS.
Regardless of the cloud or the complexity, it is all about performance and RAS. Another USA Today article details web site performance of travel websites and correlates it to the company’s profitability. (http://m.usatoday.com/…). In addition the article focuses on the total travel booking experience. Web sites have finally figured out the financial benefits from performance and RAS through simpler and more intuitive web application data processing.
Next week I’ll tell you about some IDUG resources you can use in your DB2 performance tuning.
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