IBM DB2 and DB2 DataWarehouse Edition

RDBMS for those who are looking for peak performance and without-compromise reliability

DB2 is IBM’s proprietary database product that stores data in a relational database. DB2 is designed to efficiently store, analyze and present data to the user. Currently, the latest version of DB2 is 11.5.

A DB2 database system consists of a DB2 server and server clients, of which the DB2 server provides RDBMS (Relational database management system) based data to the clients. The server itself runs the SQL commands written on the client, which allows the user to edit the database.

The DB2 database is administered by the DBA (database administrator), who assigns user rights to the system and can monitor the activities of concurrent users. Users are able to create  schemas and tables via DDL (Data Definition Language), and define table spaces, indexes, stored procedures, etc.

Key benefits of using DB2:

• Queries from compressed tables: Provision of script results without the need to modify compressed tables created for optimized space utilization
• AI & ML (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning) functionalities: ML query optimization, hybrid data management for easy querying of structured and unstructured data
• On-premise, private cloud or public cloud deployment
• LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows) compatibility

IBM Db2 Warehouse Edition is a “turnkey” analytical database product based on DB2, providing high reliability of processing and serving through BLU processing technology (in-memory column-ordered queries) and MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture.

Recommended use-cases:

• The data must remain on-premise, physically, yet with a case of high flexibility
• Some enterprise processes move between private cloud and public cloud
• The enterprise uses a hybrid architecture

Warehouse implementation is simple due to the docker-container technology used. In a multinode environment, a minimum of 3 nodes is expected, with a maximum of between 24 and 60 nodes depending on the data partitions used. The installation can be done mostly automatically after downloading the Warehouse image.