A year after bringing the in-memory database software DB2 with BLU Acceleration to market, IBM has enhanced the technology to make it simpler, more economical and faster to analyze massive amounts of data—even if the data resides in a transactional system rather than a data warehouse.
IBM said its new DB2 capabilities deliver analytics at the speed of thought and have a range of innovations including enhancements to BLU Acceleration, IBM’s in-memory technology that loads terabytes of data in memory and streamlines query workloads. Indeed, IBM claims the new technology loads data 1,000 times faster than other leading databases.
Users can also perform real-time analytics on big data and transactional data in the same operational system using “Shadow Tables,” eliminating the need to maintain one database for transactional workloads and another for analytical workloads. The performance of analytical queries can also improve by 10 times or more, with equal or greater transactional performance.
“When the business demands answers, it simply can’t handle the latency of moving data around to get the answers it needs at that moment,” Sean Poulley, Database and Data Warehouse vice president in IBM’s Information Management group, said in a statement. “Our clients and partners are telling us that DB2 with BLU Acceleration and our latest enhancements give them a simple way to solve this very real business problem for them, helping to provide competitive differentiation and drive growth.”
Moreover, businesses are facing unprecedented pressure to analyze much more data at faster speeds and lower costs. Thus, there is an increased need to run real-time analytics directly on operational data without slowing the rest of the transactional system. In addition, organizations want to simplify their infrastructure by having operational reporting and transactions in a single data management platform to support business-critical workloads, IBM said.
“The new DB2 capabilities will allow us to leverage our online transaction databases for analytics,” Mike Petkau, director of database architecture and administration at TMW Systems, said in a statement. “Reporting on our data is critical and Shadow Tables will allow us to do that all in one database, on one system. With DB2 handling all the heavy lifting, we can get valuable information from our data faster, with less effort.”
Meanwhile, IBM said the new DB2 with BLU Acceleration capabilities change the economics of high availability by supporting a broad range of choices for hardware such as small clusters, geographically dispersed configurations and low-volume transaction processing solutions.
The IBM solution also supports the SAP business suite giving customers a solid, low-cost, and next generation in-memory alternative that complements their existing technology investments. IBM said users running SAP environments gain a solid, in-memory alternative that complements their existing technology investments. And SAP Business Warehouse users can adopt next-generation in-memory technology with solid performance with no disruption, as there is no need to purchase new hardware or upgrade their application, IBM said.