The International DB2 User Group (IDUG) North American conference is celebrating both DB2 for z/OS’ 30 year anniversary and its own 25-year anniversary of representing the DB2 Users around the world. The IDUG conference is going to be especially good this year because of the five reasons I mentioned here. With the latest information DB2 11 for z/OS, DB2 10.5 for LUW, the conference will be full of new valuable detailed content to help you avoid problems and design the best systems and applications.
DB2 and IDUG have prospered for many reasons and the following three reasons are I believe some of the most important reasons that DB2 and IDUG will continue to endure and prosper for many more years to come.
First, IBM and the DB2 development team put performance first. While data integrity is a given within any database, DB2 continues to use its optimizer, algorithms and performance patterns to reduce the amount of CPU and I/O to get answers from the database. Every release and version has raised the bar on performance making sure to continue to lead the industry and stay ahead of the competition.
Performance and reducing the total cost of ownership for DB2 has been a common theme for every new version. The buzz coming out of the DB2 11 Beta and especially DB2 Version 10.5 Kepler that I detailed here continue the great tradition of DB2 leading the database industry in performance. I expect at this IDUG, like previous years, more details of these new DB2 versions will be made public so I can share them here in the coming weeks. That is another reason IDUG is so important and continues to be a leading database industry conference for getting the latest and greatest DB2 information along with networking with the people that design and work with DB2 in companies around the world.
Next, DB2 continues to be open and embrace any new data types. When DB2 was first introduced it started supplying answers only against standard data types. With subsequent releases DB2 has put its optimizer and processing algorithms to use for all varieties of new data types: unstructured, video, audio, XML, and lately the new graph data stores. All of these new data types and their related processing patterns have had the IBM researchers and scientists studying the data type usage and I/O characteristics. Each I/O pattern characteristic of these new data types has been embraced and optimized so that DB2 can get the best performance possible and continue to lead the industry.
Also, DB2, unlike several other popular industry databases, provides the freedom to have user defined data types (UDT) and user defined functions (UDF). These UDTs and UDFs provide DB2 users the capabilities to experiment and define their own new data types and processing functionality. This openness to any new data type imaginable helps the users build any business system solution and is another critical attribute of why DB2 continues to be embraced for all types of new applications and systems. Seeing presentations on these new data types UDTs and UDFs is another reason IDUG is special because it caters to all aspects of DB2.
Third, IBM DB2 continues to acquire, incorporate and leverage new software and hardware technology at an amazing rate. Through the last thirty years IBM has studied and sometimes acquired startup database technology companies to incorporate their technology inside the DB2 family. Many of these new software techniques and processing patterns have come from open source efforts. IBM has sponsored or been involved with academic or other industry open source efforts. This is why you see IBM incorporating the Hadoop graph store type technology while jettisoning its “R” application language in favor of standard SQL.
These many acquisitions over the years as well as the recent Netezza technology have been great examples of how quickly IBM, due to the flexibility of the DB2 family, is able to incorporate these new technologies. The Netezza technology especially has been a huge success after being incorporated into the IDAA z/OS solution providing dramatic query execution time reductions. Hardware gating and I/O interrogation via the hardware chip technology continues to help DB2 provide industry leading performance and will for years to come as this technology becomes more sophisticated.
Getting information on these new software and hardware technologies along with application development and database designs techniques has always been IDUG’s strength. This year like other years, IDUG is having DB2 users, beta customers, IBM DB2 developers and third party vendors explain and present all this new technology and processing patterns.
These are the reasons DB2 continues to be an industry performance leader and IDUG continues to give you the best information directly from the sources. See you there!
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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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