DB2 11 for z/OS: Unmatched Efficiency for Big Data and Analytics

by Julian Stuhler

Few IT professionals can have missed the big data phenomenon that has manifested itself in recent years. Industry publications and IT analysts have devoted a huge percentage of their output to the subject (creating a big data challenge all their own in the process). There can be little doubt that the advent of new technologies and methods of customer and business interaction have created unique challenges for organizations wishing to create actionable insight from very large amounts of unstructured data. Innovative tools and techniques have been developed to cope with these "big data" challenges (and indeed some of them are discussed in this paper, in the "Hadoop and Big Data Support" section).

However, beyond this somewhat narrow definition of big data, many organizations have been dealing with the challenges of processing, maintaining, and analyzing ever -increasing amounts of more traditionally structured data for many years. The inherent scalability and resilience of IBM® DB2® for z/OS® and the underlying System z® platform have proven to be a compelling combination for such applications, and IBM continues to invest in extending DB2's capabilities with each new release.

From transparent archiving to greater in-memory scalability through the use of 2 GB page frames, DB2 11 for z/OS, the latest release of IBM's flagship database, contains many new features specifically designed to help customers to address the challenges of managing traditional big data. A wealth of material exists on the technical changes within DB2 11, but finding descriptions of how those new features will improve your business results can be a challenge. The main body of this paper provides a high-level overview of the major new features from an IT executive's perspective, with emphasis on the underlying business value that DB2 11 can deliver.

This is the fourth paper in this series, with previous editions highlighting the business value offered by DB2 for z/OS V8.1, DB2 9 for z/OS, and DB2 10 for z/OS:

• DB2 for z/OS 8.1: Driving Business Value (J. Stuhler, Triton Consulting, 2004)

• DB2 9 for z/OS: Data on Demand (J. Stuhler, Triton Consulting, 2007)

• DB2 10 for z/OS: A Smarter Database for a Smarter Planet (J. Stuhler, Triton Consulting, 2010)

NOTE:Throughout the remainder of this document, all references to "DB2 9," "DB2 10," and "DB2 11" refer to the relevant release of IBM DB2 for z/OS.

DB2 11 for z/OS: The Database for Big Data and Analytics

In this section, we take a detailed look at the major features of DB2 11 for z/OS and see how many of IBM's most innovative enterprise customers plan to use them to deliver an enhanced IT service to the business. Many of these enhancements can deliver benefits "out of the box," with little or no effort required to begin exploiting them, reducing the time-to-value for a DB2 11 upgrade. See "DB2 11 New Features by Implementation Effort" (opposite) for a breakdown of the effort required to exploit each new feature.

This section is organized around the key DB2 11 themes:

• Efficiency. Reducing cost and improving productivity

• Resilience. Improving availability and data security

• Business analytics. Enhanced query and reporting

Efficiency

Even in the most favorable economic climate, businesses need to control costs and increase efficiency to improve their bottom line. In today's increasingly challenging business environment, this continues to be a key factor for the survival and success of enterprises of all sizes.

This section examines the major DB2 11 enhancements that are aimed at delivering the highest efficiency for core IT systems that rely on DB2, a key design objective for the new release. These features can help reduce ongoing operational costs, improve developer and DBA productivity, and enhance customer experience by increasing performance and delivering a more responsive application.

CPU Reductions

Most DB2 for z/OS customers operate on a CPU usage-based charging model, so any increases or decreases in the amount of CPU required to run DB2 applications can have a direct and very significant impact on overall operational costs.

Traditionally, IBM has tried to limit the additional CPU cost of adding new functionality into each release, keeping the net CPU impact below 5 percent. The move to a 64-bit computing platform in DB2 for z/OS Version 8 was an exception to this rule and introduced some significant processing overheads that resulted in many customers experiencing net CPU increases of 5 to 10 percent following the upgrade.

DB2 9 for z/OS helped to redress the balance somewhat by delivering modest CPU improvements for many large customers, but the advent of DB2 10 completely changed the picture. IBM delivered the most aggressive performance improvements of any DB2 release in the past 20 years, with many customers seeing net CPU savings of 5 to 10 percent or more in their traditional DB2 online transaction processing (OLTP) workload without any application changes being required. Unsurprisingly, these savings proved to be very popular and are consistently quoted as being one of the major reasons for customers to upgrade to DB2 10.

IBM has further developed the CPU reduction theme within DB2 11, with initial savings of up to 5 percent expected for customers running simple OLTP workloads. Significantly higher savings are possible for complex OLTP and query workloads, as discussed below. Because these improvements are due to internal DB2 code optimization, they are available in DB2 11 Conversion Mode, without the need for any application changes. Additional CPU savings are possible once customers begin to use some of the other DB2 11 enhancements that require application change, as described elsewhere in this section.

Some workloads will benefit more than others from the performance enhancements offered by DB2 11. Figure 1 breaks down the anticipated CPU savings by workload type.

The most significant benefits are expected to be seen within query workloads. Complex reporting queries can see up to 25 percent savings for uncompressed tables and up to 40 percent for queries on compressed tables. Reporting queries with heavy sort processing may also see additional DB2 CPU savings.

Traditional OLTP workloads are also likely to benefit from the efficiency enhancements in DB2 11. Savings of up to 5 percent are expected for simple OLTP, with reductions of up to 10 percent for more complex transactions. Finally, update-intensive batch workloads may enjoy CPU reductions of 5 to 15 percent.

Figures 2 and 3 depict some actual observed CPU reductions for sample workloads, run as part of IBM's internal performance testing for the new release. These...