In his latest article for Database Journal, Julian Stuhler takes a look at DB2 pureScale and the possible implications for the entire IBM DB2 world.
For many years, DB2 for z/OS has been able to provide mainframe users with unmatched levels of resilience and scalability courtesy of some rather neat technology known as data sharing. This makes use of IBM’s Parallel Sysplex technology to allow many DB2 subsystems (or “members”) to share the same data in a shared-disk architecture. In October 2009, IBM announced that similar capabilities would be delivered for the DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows product, in an optional facility dubbed pureScale.
At the IBM Smarter Systems Tour in Beijing yesterday IBM announced that DB2 pureScale is now available on System x. This is great news as it will allow DB2 on System x users to benefit from the continuous availability and scale-out capabilities of DB2 pureScale.
DB2 pureScale is supported on the following IBM System x servers:
Last week IBM unveiled their latest mainframe – the IBM zEnterprise System.
According to the official launch site the zEnterprise brings:
The industry’s fastest enterprise system. Delivering 50 BIPS, zEnterprise is ideal for large-scale data and transaction serving and mission critical enterpris applications.
Unified management for multi-platform environments. Unified Resource Manager, part of the IBM System Director family, is an integrated System z management facility responsible for zEnterprise platform management.
Customer choice of workload optimisation systems. Run on the system besst suited for each appllication – AIX on IBM Power7 Blaed or Linux System x Blaed, all managed by zEnterprise. Workload-specific optimisers can accelerate time to insight and reduce costs.
Predictable service delviery. zEnterpruse is built on best-in-class systems and software technologies. It’s a system of systems that unifies for rapid, predictable service delivery.
In his latest article for Database Journal Julian Stuhlershares his pick of the most important current trends in the world of IBM Information Management. Some are completely new and some are evolutions of existing technologies, and he’s betting that every one of them will have some sort of impact on data management professionals during the next 12-18 months. Click here for the full article.
This session will cover the end-to-end monitoring, alerting and protection of information that’s stored on or managed by System z. You’ll see how it can help:
Ensure compliance by properly controlling who sees, uses and accesses your data
Monitor usage and access and detect threats in real time
Protect the underlying DB2® and IMS™ data stores
Ensure separation of controls and flexible audit and reporting
Archive data intelligently for compliance, performance optimization and lower storage costs
Speakers: Mark Simmonds, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Information Management division, System z, IBM Software Group and Ernie Mancill, Executive IT Specialist System z, IBM Sales and Distribution
Last month we were delighted to be given the opportunity to visit IBM’s research and development centre in Boeblingen, Germany. Before I get on to what exactly we were doing there I’d like to share a little information about the centre itself as it’s quite a place! Opened in 1953, Boeblingen is host to a whopping 2000 IT specialists, electrical engineers and physicists working on over 40 projects! Their focus is on the development of next generation microprocessors, mainframes and supercomputers and enterprise software to control business processes. In addition, Boeblingen is one of the largest LINUX and SAP integration centres within IBM. So we were rightly excited about the visit.
The reason for the trip was to carry out our own research and development work on IBM’s newest technology release – IBM DB2 pureScale. Ever since hearing the first announcement last year, our team of DB2 experts have been itching to get their hands on the software and see what it can do. The most exciting thing about this trip was that we were to be the first IBM Business Partners in Europe to get a look at DB2 pureScale in action – what a fantastic opportunity!
So, three of our DB2 experts set off for five days in the labs. After a warm welcome from the pureScale team in Boeblingen, it was soon down to business. As an R&D team the brief was to gain practical experience in the installation, operation and use of a DB2 pureScale environment, as well as testing DB2 pureScale for scalability and resilience.
Meet the team
Iqbal Goralwalla – Head of DB2 Midrange Solutions
Specialist DB2 pureScale subject – DB2 Self-Tuning Memory Manager (STMM), Bufferpools and Workload Balancing
James Gill – DB2 for z/OS and data sharing expert
Specialist DB2 pureScale subject – Coupling Facility
This video highlights some of the new features in DB2 9.7 that make it very easy to enable Oracle applications to DB2. It includes demos for features like support for PL/SQL, CLP Plus, the free IBM Data Movement tool, and Optim Development studio for debugging.
This video highlights how easily and instantly you can scale your workloads by simply adding a member to the DB2 pureScale cluster. It also shows how quickly DB2 pureScale recovers in case of a member failure.
In this presentation we look at why DB2 pureScale is the ideal solution for the retail sector and give an in-depth look at this exciting new technology.
If you make use of RTS and DEFINE NO, you might want to review your processes to ensure that you’re picking up all of the tablespaces you should be……
Since V7 of DB2 for z/OS, IBM has provided a Real Time Statistics (RTS) feature, which is a set of tables that DB2 keeps (more or less) up to date with recent activity against all tables and indexes in the system. In particular, the RTS tables provide detailed information on the amount of update activity that has happened since a given object was last REORGed or had RUNSTATS executed against it. That information is obviously very useful when determining when those utilities need to be run next, so many sites base their housekeeping schedules on this information (either using their own bespoke code and procedures, or a vendor tool such as IBM’s DB2 Automation Tool). In particular, looking at the number of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations as a proportion of the total rows in the table (using the TOTALROWS column) is useful, so you can reorg a table when more than 10% of the rows have been changed, for example.
We came across a problem recently, where one of our customers was using this feature in a DB2 9 for z/OS subsystem that had lots of DEFINE NO tablespaces (which instructs DB2 to defer creating the underlying VSAM dataset until the table is actually referenced – very handy for ERP systems such as SAP that create a large number of tables that are never used in a given environment).
For normal DEFINE YES tablespaces, a row is created in the RTS tables as soon as the tablespace is created, with the statistics initially set to zero values and updated in real time to reflect activity against the underlying table. Unfortunately, the situation is different for DEFINE NO tablespaces: the row isn’t created until the VSAM dataset is defined on first use (no problem there) but instead of zeroes some fields (including the number of rows in the TOTALROWS column) are set to null instead. That null value isn’t updated until the first REORG or LOAD is run against the table, so if the table is populated via INSERT rather than LOAD, your nice RTS monitoring routines may never trigger that first REORG!
This “feature” has been reported to IBM, but in the meantime if you make use of RTS and DEFINE NO, you might want to review your processes to ensure that you’re picking up all of the tablespaces you should be……
