db2Dean’s 2013 IOD Highlights

Dean Compher

26 November 2013

 

 

 

While I didn’t see anything or any celebrity interesting enough to take another selfie with this year, I was able to learn lots of great new stuff at the IOD sessions and upgrade my DB2 certification to 10.5.  There was tons of information and I’ll give you a summary of what I learned along with many random tips and tricks.  This year I concentrated more on Big Data, but still had time to get to some great DB2 sessions.  If you attend the conference as you should have, then you can download many of the presentations from the Conference Presentation Search Page. As time has gone on many more have been added, so try again if something you wanted was not available on the site when you first got back.  I look forward to seeing you at the conference next year!  Also please add anything else you though was really interesting to my db2Dean Facebook Page or to the “Message Board” section of my db2Dean Community page. 

 

Big Data

Big data is getting a lot of attention lately so I went to a number of sessions on this topic.  Big data does not seem to have any one definition in the industry as far as I can tell so I’ll give my opinion on what it is.  It is the capability to store a large quantity of data and the ability to analyze that data efficiently.  The data can be in several forms including structured relational data, unstructured data, NoSQL data and large files.  This data can be in traditional databases, Hadoop clusters and other platforms.  The ability to analyze the data will depend on a set of tools since no one tool is going to be able to analyze all data formats.  IBM provides a set of tools to store both your non-relational (think Hadoop clusters) and relational data (databases hold the relational stuff) and several different tools to analyze and use the data.  Several of these tools are included in the Big Insights offering.  Here I’ll give some of the session highlights about various tools for Big Data:

 

 

BLU Acceleration

BLU Acceleration is the flagship new feature in DB2 10.5 that can improve the performance of analytical queries by orders of magnitude.  Since it only changes the implementation and processing of tables, no SQL or coding changes are needed in applications to use it.  It is a combination of technologies that can make queries run much faster.  These technologies include storing data by column instead of by row which makes for better compression and more efficient I/O, new caching algorithms to give in-memory speeds even when all data does not fit into memory, recognizes and exploits processor technologies to get more work done in each CPU tick, can even skip searching groups of rows that do not help the query.  Since it does not use indexes, MDCs, MQTs or other objects it is great when you don’t really know what queries will look like.   To learn more about this amazing technology, please read chapter 3 of the DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration book.  You can even try if for free through about mid-February by registering for  BLU for Cloud.

 

 

DB2 10.5

Of course some of the biggest news at IOD this year was about the newly released DB2 version 10.5.  I discussed a number of facets of the new release in my DB2 10.5 article, but I learned a number of new items at the conference.  Some of these features are in all editions and some are only in certain editions.  To see if the feature that interests you is in your favorite edition see the Functionality by Edition page.  Here are some of the more interesting ones, some of which have been in earlier versions:

 

 

Upgrading to DB2 10.5

Melanie Stopfer gave a great presentation on how upgrade to DB2 10.5.  For lots of other good upgrade information see the DB2 Upgrade Portal.  The bullets here on this topic are just some highlights from her presentation:

 

 

IBM Data Studio

With the release of DB2 v10.1 there is no more Control Center and you should start using the IBM Data Studio.  The Client Configuration Assistant is also gone.  Nearly all functions of control center are now in Data Studio plus it has several others such as a procedure builder and debugger and a feature to generate scripts to change database schema while preserving data.  For a summary of the tool, please see my series of articles starting with Data Studio Update Part 1 or see my Data Studio Web Console article to see how to do health monitoring and task management.  A number of improvements have been made with the release of Data Studio 4.1 including being able to administer the new features of DB2 v10.5 like BLU.

 

 

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I hope that you found at least a few pieces of information in this article to be new and useful.  I hope to see you at the conference next year. 

 

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