IBM DB2 Database Updated For Big Data

IBM has revealed strong client and business partner support for the new version of its DB2 database software.

Now generally available, the new software – which represents the work of hundreds of IBM developers and researchers in labs around the world – adds IBM’s hot new BLU Acceleration technology that makes it simpler, more economical and faster to analyse massive amounts of data.

Big Data

BLU Acceleration enables users to have much faster access to key information. Among the companies worldwide that have experienced strong results from the new IBM software is the large northern Europe bank Handelsbanken.

“We were very impressed with the performance and simplicity of BLU,” Lennart Henang, an IT architect at Handelsbanken, said in a statement. “We found that some queries achieved an almost 100 times speedup with literally no tuning. We were seeing average acceleration of 7.4 times, with some queries going from 28 seconds down to sub-zero response time.”

Yonyou Software Co. in Beijing, an enterprise management software and cloud service provider, also had positive results with the technology. According to Jianbo Liu, IT performance manager at Yonyou, “ERP [enterprise resource planning] and accounting software applications run a lot of reports. We used DB2 BLU Acceleration and saw our reports run faster by up to 40 times. This type of technology is an ideal fit for Yonyou’s big data analytic services.”

IBM says the new IBM DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration aims for analytics at the speed of thought with a range of made-in-IBM-Labs advances to significantly speed analytic workloads for databases and data warehouses. These innovations include dynamic in-memory technology that loads terabytes of data in random access memory, which streamlines query workloads even when data sets exceed the size of the memory. Another such innovation is “Actionable Compression,” which allows analytics to be performed directly on compressed data without having to decompress it; some customers have reported as much as 10 times storage space savings.

In addition, IBM provides the simplicity to allow clients access to blazing-fast analytics transparently to their applications, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modelling or time-consuming data warehouse tuning, as well as the ability to take advantage of both multi-core and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) features in IBM Power and Intel x86 processors.

Speed Matters

“The incredibly positive feedback we’re hearing from clients and partners illustrates that we’re meeting a major need in the market – an innovative and powerful yet simple solution that can ingest huge amounts of data and apply insights from all this data at the point of impact. And do so with unparalleled speed,” Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Information Management, said in a statement. “IBM’s work with beta clients and internal tests show unmatched speed and simplicity. In one example, BLU Acceleration was shown to be 10 times faster than another well-known in-memory database system. Some queries that took 7 minutes were shown to have dropped to 8 milliseconds, thanks to the innovations in BLU Acceleration.”