IBM’s DB2: After 30 Years and a Look Ahead

by Darryl K. Taft

The name DB2, or IBM Database 2, was first given to the Database Management System or DBMS, in 1983 when IBM released DB2 on its MVS mainframe platform.

For some years DB2, was exclusively available on IBM mainframes. Through the years, IBM has brought DB2 to other platforms, including Unix, Windows and Linux. DB2 is optimized for the cloud, SAP, Intel’s Xeon processor and IBM POWER. This expansion has brought the power of the relational database to a variety of businesses worldwide.

Until the mid-1970s, computers sorted information using rigid, one-off database programs. Predecessor systems like IBM’s IMS and VSAM on the mainframe could store megabytes of data, but it had to be entered and retrieved in the same structured way every time. IBM researcher E. F. “Ted” Codd wanted to improve the way data was sorted and handled. He sought to create a generalized description of how to store, update and extract data with accuracy, and query responses so any changes to data produced consistent results. In 1970, Codd completed his definition of the relational database, which became the foundation for IBM DB2 products.

Pat Selinger, a leading member of the IBM Research team that produced the world’s first relational database system, said: “More than three decades ago, as we built the research prototype that became the foundation for DB2, we were determined to prove that the relational databases were usable and could perform well. Wow. Did IBM ever prove that.”

BLU acceleration, invented in IBM Research and to be commercialized in DB2 Version 10.5, provides several innovations. These include “data skipping,” which offers the ability to pass over duplicate data or data that doesn’t need to be analyzed; the ability to analyze data in parallel across different processors; greater ability to analyze data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling; “actionable compression,” in which data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed; and performance improvements over traditional in-memory systems that allow data to be loaded into random access memory instead of hard disks for greater speed.

Beta customer Andrew Juarez, an IT lead at Coca-Cola Bottling Co., said: “These queries are coming back in seconds. Those … quick-minute decisions that the analytics are providing us are not a nice-to-have, [they are] essential to being able to stay competitive.”

“BLU Acceleration is a game-changer,” said Kent Collins, a database solutions architect at BNSF Railway.

John Schlesinger, chief enterprise architect at banking software company Temenos, said of DB2 10.5: “We created a table of 200 million records with financial data. What took 30 seconds, now takes one third of a second.”

“IBM wanted to make using the BLU extremely easy, so a simple registry setting, DB2_WORKLOAD=Analytics, turns on BLU,” said Evan Quinn, senior principal analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “That simple setting ensures that all subsequent database definitions will default to a columnar format, and all the technologies of acceleration will come to bear. IBM has plans to spread BLU acceleration throughout its product line, including future availability for z/OS databases.”

The 30th anniversary has spawned a Facebook page started by fans and users of DB2 on z/OS. IBM’s DB2 also has a Twitter handle.