IBM BLU Acceleration - Best Yet for Big Data!

Database management performance continues to advance with the latest IBM BLU Acceleration technology improvements unveiled today.  The IBM BLU Acceleration technology features new innovations from the IBM Research and Development Labs that literally dramatically cuts Big Data issues down in size, provides incredibly faster development time and operational production answers quickly.  

The new IBM BLU Acceleration technology, unveiled along with a set of other Big Data products in an announcement code-named Project Athens, is very impressive for many reasons.  I believe the following four are the most important aspects.  You need to know about the IBM BLU Acceleration technology because it is the new technology that will change your design points for Big Data and will provide a huge positive performance impact on your Big Data, data warehouse and operational system architectures.

First the IBM BLU Acceleration technology leverages a new level of data compression.  Over the years we have seen the compression technologies shrink our storage and I/O requirements.  The new IBM BLU Acceleration technology takes compression to the next level with 10x storage space savings. Some of the beta customers are getting 90-95% data compression for their large data warehouse database tables.  

The impressive compression is achieved through IBM BLU Acceleration’s new in-memory columnar table data store technology.  This technology is so impressive that it completely eliminates the need for defining indexes on your data since it is faster to just scan through the columnar data store.  By shrinking the overall database table size and eliminating indexes the new IBM BLU Acceleration technology has a huge impact on performance tuning and also on-going operational backup and disaster recovery costs.    This Dynamic In-memory technology also has the intelligence to move data from storage to memory as needed – delivering in-memory performance without the limitations of an in-memory only system.

Second, the new IBM BLU Acceleration technology introduces Actionable Compression, a patented compression algorithm that preserves the data value order of information while compressed.  By preserving the data order processing can start, skip and finish analyzing the data better, faster and only access and leverage the needed data.

Third, the new IBM BLU Acceleration technology leverages the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) technology that is inside the latest manufactured microprocessor chipsets.  The SIMD BLU technology is important because instead of having to issue multiple instructions or loop through to interrogate data within the chip’s buffer, only one instruction needs to be issued.  SIMD is like a drill sergeant issuing a command to entire platoon instead of to each individual serially.   These types of SIMD instructions and operations are especially performance productive for interrogating and processing unstructured data, but are also useful for helping performance on all data types.   The combination of SIMD processing and multi-core parallelism is called Parallel Vector Processing.

Fourth, the new IBM BLU Acceleration technology introduces data skipping.  The new data skipping access technology does exactly what you’d think.  It skips unnecessary or irrelevant data not needed for a data warehouse SQL answer.  This data skipping combined with the new compression algorithm preserving data order is very powerful for quickly eliminating and skipping through your data to improve performance and filtering for your SQL query WHERE clause processing.  

All of the new IBM BLU Acceleration technology is so impressive it is not only being incorporated into the IBM DB2.  Elements of the technology are also found in a new version of Informix that brings in-memory performance to time series data reporting and analytics.  IBM has also said it intends to expand the use of BLU Acceleration for other data workloads and in other products in the future.  

Instead of always thinking you need a Hadoop system that requires multiple copies of the data for your Big Data, your shop should consider the new DB2 with BLU Acceleration to get compression storage savings of 10x as well as improved time to market, query performance and operational aspects for your Big Data system.

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Have you made your plans for IDUG in Orlando this year?  Also make sure to register early and get the IDUG early bird discount. Sign up today!

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2013 North America conference.  The conference will be held in Orlando, Florida on April 29-May 2, 2013.  Get more information at www.idug.org.

Also being an IBM Data Champion I get to sponsor an attendee for the IDUG conference through the Mentor program.  This enables them to get a reduced registration fee.  Email me if you are interested.

I will be speaking at the conference presenting Big Data and Analytics Session F07 – “Data Warehouse Designs for Big Data Performance” Wed, May 01, 2013 (02:15 PM – 03:15 PM) in Bonaire 5&6.
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Dave Beulke is an internationally recognized DB2 consultant, DB2 trainer and education instructor.  Dave helps his clients improve their strategic direction, dramatically improve DB2 performance and reduce their CPU demand saving millions in their systems, databases and application areas within their mainframe, UNIX and Windows environments.

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