Triton Consulting

IBMs flagship European event – Information on Demand - begins today in Rome.

The agenda covers the full spectrum of information management and includes keynote sessions from leading IBM, customer, and business partner speakers.  There are hands-on technical labs and industry round tables.

Our very own Julian Stuhler will be speaking at the Data Management keynote session on Wednesday 19th May at 15.15 CET.  He will be on stage with Martin Wildberger, Vice President, Information Management Development.  During the session Julian will be discussing his own personal technical experience and the experience Triton has had with DB2 9.7 and DB2 pureScale.

Keep up to date with all the happenings here and via twitter.

Triton Director, Julian Stuhler, has begun a new blog on toolbox.com.

Golden DB2 updates will cover techie tips, news and updates from the world of DB2.  As an IBM Gold Consultant, Julian is always first on the list to hear about innovations in DB2 so subscribe today and keep up to date with the latest DB2 information.  Julian would love to hear your thoughts so you can contact him by leaving your comments on the blog. 

Access it here – http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/golden-db2/

As always, the answer to this is “it depends”! However, here are some basic rules of thumb that you may find useful:

• Define an application environment specifically for your Java stored procedures. This should have NUMTCB set to a relatively low value (6-8 is good) as Java stored procedures typically require a lot of storage. Java SPs also have their own JCL DD statement requirements, such as entries for JAVAENV and JSPDEBUG.
• Define another environment specifically for your REXX stored procedures. Only a single REXX SP can run in any given application environment at any one time, so you need to set NUMTCB=1 for these.
• Define an application environment specifically for stored procedures that need to run under RACF program control (some of the IBM-supplied SPs fall into this category, such as DSNACCUC). These SPs need their own environment: if you try to execute both program-controlled and non program-controlled SPs in the same environment you’ll receive message ICH420I and the controlled SPs will fail.
• Define an application environment to host all of the IBM-supplied stored procedures that don’t fall into one of the above categories.
• Define 1-n environments for your “normal” COBOL, PL/1, C or SQL stored procedures. NUMTCB for these can typically be set fairly high (40-50 isn’t uncommon).
• Finally, you may want to consider having one or more test environments for your normal procedures, but with NUMTCB=1. This forces procedures to be run individually, which can be very useful during debugging when your procedure writes messages to address space log. Failing to do this can result in several procedures interleaving their debug messages, which can get very confusing. A simple ALTER PROCEDURE statement is all that is required to change the application environment, but don’t forget to stop/start the procedure afterwards.

 So, what exactly is spatial data? Here’s a simple definition:

In its most basic form, spatial data is made up of one or more sets of co-ordinates that specify a location (usually but not always on planet Earth!).

Most businesses today already store extensive location data, for customers, suppliers, competitors, branches and many other items. For many large corporations, that data is stored in DB2 for z/OS.  The availability of spatial features within DB2 for z/OS will allow those organisations to derive valuable new information and deliver new capabilities to their customers.

Read the full article

27th October

The third day of the Gold Briefing, and opening day for IOD, is in the history books and there is no shortage of new announcements and interesting tit-bits to share. The opening session was the usual mix of high level overviews and interesting technical information accompanied by a little light entertainment (courtesy of Terry Fator, the very gifted winner of “America’s Got Talent”). Overall attendance here looks pretty good, and I’d say the numbers are pretty much the same as last year but with more users/customers and less IBM employees.

Yesterday I talked about IBM’s exciting new pureScale technology for the DB2 for LUW platform. Before I move on to talk about some interesting mainframe related technologies as I promised, I just want to briefly mention a couple of extra pureScale items that became apparent yesterday when IBM issued the formal announcement for the technology (see announcement letter ENUSZP09-0487). The first is a firm availability date: December 11^th 2009 for electronic media delivery. There has also been some confusion over the version of DB2 for LUW that pureScale will work with: it requires a DB2 for LUW 9.7 Server Edition licence, and when installed the database will report its version as being 9.8.

And now a quick look at what’s been happening on the mainframe side. More and more details are being made available regarding the next release of DB2 for z/OS (cunningly codenamed “DB2 X” as a way of concealing the real version number from those that don’t understand Roman numerals). I’ll cover the contents of this release in more depth in future blog entries and will also produce a new version of the “Business Value” white paper series to assist with upgrade justification and planning. In the meantime, the headline features that most people seem to be most excited about here at IOD are the anticipated CPU savings (potentially helping to claw back some or all of the performance regression that may have been experienced in the move to 64-bit at Version and the new temporal data support (which allows DB2 to store historical versions of a row and enables the developer to select data as of a given timestamp and see what the row looked like at that time).

There’s a major push on Analytics here, as part of the Information-Led Transformation strategy I talked about a couple of days ago. The mainframe is not immune to this, and in addition to some nice extensions to the core database engine in DB2 X to support warehousing queries, IBM has also begun to talk of a much more fundamental and exciting development in the shape of its “Smart Analytics Optimizer”.  This is essentially a BI/analytics appliance aimed at boosting the database query performance of the servers that it’s attached to. The big news is that this will be available to connect to System z servers very soon, allowing DB2 for z/OS to offload suitable workload to the SAO for processing (with all of the attendant performance and cost advantages). I hope to be in a position to talk more about this exciting new development as more details are announced.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow is the last day of the Gold Briefing and I’ll be heading home, but I’ll try to find time for a last Gold/IOD post to cover the day’s news and draw a few conclusions on the whole event.

26th October 2009

Day 2 of the Gold Briefing, and I’m not the only one to see the irony of suffering from information overload at a data management conference!

Yesterday I talked about IBM’s grand vision for Information-Led Transformation and the way it builds upon the innovations and acquisitions made over the past few years. I also mentioned that, important though these higher-level initiatives are for making today’s enterprises more agile and efficient, there is an ongoing requirement to continually enhance the underlying data management technology in order to address more fundamental issues such as availability, scalability and total cost of ownership.

So today I want to spend some time on a technology that was originally supposed to be announced at IOD, but for various reasons actually broke cover a few weeks ago at the IDUG Europe conference in Rome. It’s called DB2 pureScale and in my opinion it is the single most significant advance in the DB2 to LUW product in the last decade.

For over 15 years, DB2 for z/OS has provided an option to dramatically improve scalability and availability by utilising a shared disk clustering solution known as data sharing. Large enterprises all around the world have been taking advantage of this architecture ever since, allowing them to grow their workloads and support true 24×7 availability requirements. pureScale implements the same fundamental architecture within DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows, allowing IBM to use its extensive experience in this area to deliver a mature solution that is significantly different (and in my opinion superior) to competing architectures such as Oracle RAC.

Under lab conditions and running a read-intensive workload, pureScale can scale to well over 100 members with more than 80% scalability. Given the power of individual servers and the ongoing trend to cramming more and more cores into a single processor, this represents a massive amount of potential capacity and makes DB2 for LUW capable of handling the kind of workloads that would have been firmly in mainframe territory before. And with that massive capacity comes great data availability, with the loss of individual members/servers only causing a temporary “blip” in processing under most conditions.

In its initial form, pureScale is limited to an AIX environment running on IBM’s Power 550 Express and Power 595 machines, with availability expected in December 2009. This obviously limits the appeal of the technology for shops that have other DB2 running on other platforms, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see pureScale being made available on other platforms in the near future. The technology is also a natural fit for mission-critical packaged applications such as SAP and Siebel, so I’m expecting those vendors to move swiftly to exploit this technology and take advantage of the significant scalability and availability improvements it can provide for their systems.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll talk about some of the announcements made during the first day of the IOD conference, and also cover a few interesting items for the mainframe fans out there.