Hope to See you in Anaheim at IOD
I hope you are all getting ready for IOD, I know I am getting anxious. One of our partners, xkoto, has a hands-on lab at IOD that I highly recommend. I know they are getting pretty full, so go and get one of the last seats available for this.
For more information about xkoto and GRIDSCALE, check out their web site at
xkoto.com.
We are also having a series of meet the experts, and I will be available Monday morning from 10:15-11:30 and again Tuesday morning from 9:30-10:45. You can drop by room 210C, or if you can book some one on one time by going to this link
The IOD SiteHope to see you next week.
Just 2 weeks away from IOD
So we are just 2 weeks away from IOD, and I have not been blogging for a while. Sorry about that, but I have been busy working on some exciting things with DB2.
At IOD I have three presentations: DB2 for BI, Workload Management in DB2, and DB2 Active/Active Clustering. This third topic is something that I have been working on for quite a while now, and I am excited to be able to talk about it at IOD. Hopefully you can come by my sessions and we can talk about this, or if you see me walking around, feel free to stop me and ask me about it.
See you in Anaheim,
Dwaine
Sorry for the lack of Posts, and some DB2 News
Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple months. I will try to start posting more regularly.
Have you seen the news (
ZDNet Article)?
DB2 Express-C is the new, free version of DB2. Unlike Oracle 10g Express and SQL Server Express, DB2 Express-C supports 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory. In addition DB2 Express-C does not have a database size limit like Oracle 10g Express or SQL Server Express and supports 32 and 64 bit unlike MySQL.
Vote for your favorite technical books of the year
If you have read any good technical books this year you should go to
Susan Visser’s blog and vote for your favorite technical books of 2005.
Myths About Data Warehouse Appliances
Myths About Data Warehouse AppliancesIn today’s world, do you really want a single-use solution, built on proprietary hardware? Over the past couple years there has been a great deal of hype and interest in the concept of the data warehouse appliance. Much of this hype has been about the advantages the appliance is supposed to bring to organizations trying to balance the demands for ever increasing data along with reduced budgets. The benefits of the data warehouse appliance have been touted repeatedly, and some of the benefits are true and are likely to be seen by their customers. The benefits that are most commonly being advertised are ease of installation/administration, short time to value, and low TCO.While data warehouse appliance vendors are promoting the advantages of their solution, they are also saying that in order to achieve these benefits customers must use specialized (what they really mean is proprietary) hardware platforms since this is the only way to build an appliance. This is one of the Data Warehouse Appliance Myths. These vendors have been very good at avoiding calling their systems proprietary, but that is exactly what they are. They have been sure to throw out the word commodity, and continually mention commodity components in their discussions. While they are using commodity components, they are building a system from these components and assembling them with proprietary code and connections into a solution that can suit one and only one application. This is the definition of a closed or proprietary solution.With this type of solution, support and maintenance is only possible from the vendor; the opportunity to reuse or deploy the platform for other purposes, thus protecting investment and allowing for a more dynamic business, is all but eliminated. In this day and age single-use proprietary hardware is not desirable.Another of the myths is that that building this “proprietary” system this is the only way to assemble a low-cost, high performance data warehouse solution. There is another way, and one that is not proprietary in any way.IBM has been providing software that is being used to build data warehouse appliances on arrays of low cost, commodity, off-the-shelf, servers for a number of years. The resulting solutions produce equal, if not better, performance and scalability and can still be supplied and configured as an appliance. The IBM DB2 solution is built on platforms that can be configured to do other jobs either at the same time as they are running the warehouse, or as you provision resources for other applications as required. The platform is not tied to one function or application and can be used wherever it is needed, by whatever application needs it. If we use the kitchen appliance analogy here, the DB2 solution is like a microwave, while the appliance solution is like a toaster. A toaster is good at one thing, turning bread into toast, but if you put a bagel and a slice of bread in at the same time, one does not get toasted right. You also can’t heat a can of soup with a toaster. On top of that, if you have two people who both want 2 slices of toast, unless you have a 4-slicer toaster, one of them will need to wait. DB2 is like the microwave that lets you heat soup, defrost frozen meat, warm a muffin, make popcorn, etc. Because DB2 is based on commodity hardware, and you can add incremental capacity, it is like being able to grow from a 1 cubic foot microwave to a 5 cubic foot microwave by just adding the additional capacity. So now you can cook your turkey as well as heating a slice of pizza.While single purpose devices are OK in the kitchen they are not good in the data center. With a DB2 system built on commodity components, you can provision resources to your different applications or databases as demand dictates. With a fixed appliance, you cannot use the resources for anything else, even if the system is underutilized. Let's be clear about the differences. The distinction between "commodity components" and "commodity servers" is extremely important. Commodity components (e.g., processors and memory) are the basic building blocks of virtually all hardware, proprietary or not, while commodity servers are general-purpose servers supplied by vendors such as IBM, HP, Dell, etc.The vendors of proprietary hardware in the data appliance space claim that the use of "commodity components" will allow their platforms to ride the technology curve. Designing these components into the hardware is not enough to stop platforms from becoming quickly outdated and expensive. Technologies simply move too quickly, and the development costs are unsustainably high. The safest way of ensuring that a smooth platform upgrade path is always available is to adopt a commodity platform from the major hardware vendors.The so-called benefit of closely coupled hardware and software also merits careful consideration. It was true years ago that to get the best out of any hardware the software needed to be very tightly coupled to the platform. Getting the highest levels of optimization required custom device drivers and operating system kernel software that employed lots of clever performance techniques that were just not available in standard operating systems. But today these optimization techniques are part of all operating systems, from Linux, to Windows, to UNIX, and it is certainly possible to process data as fast as a disk drive can deliver it using commodity servers running any of these operating systems. The data warehouse appliance concept seems to have a number of benefits that are appealing to customers, but it is important to remember that most appliances require proprietary hardware, and that there is an alternative. Low TCO, linearly scalable, high-performance, easy to install and manage warehouses can easily be built using DB2 UDB on low cost, industry-standard, commodity servers.
