Business technology major IBM announced enhancements to its database software IBM Db2 helping developers for downloading the software and uploading and managing their data usually within 15 minutes or less.
“Among many organizations, we’re witnessing a shift in influence to a new breed of application developer who is looking for agile ways to create apps that their companies can leverage,” said Rob Thomas, general manager at IBM Analytics.
Db2 on Cloud is a managed service, available on the IBM Cloud. A sliding scale for compute power and capacity are some of the new features.
Users can slide the scale to increase or decrease the processing power, and associated necessary RAM, instantly — with the scroll of a mouse. Users can scroll to increase storage capacity. Users can eliminate the process of requesting and procuring more computing resources from IT.
The new Db2 on Cloud complements IBM’s Db2 Hosted, a version of the database that is hosted on IBM Cloud for clients looking for greater control of the platform.
IBM said that Db2 now supports JSON, the open-standard file format that uses “human-readable” language to transmit data objects.
JSON, typically used by new applications, can be integrated into Db2’s relational database system, giving users an easy way to store application data.
Developers can use their existing SQL skills to store, manage, and select JSON data from within Db2. This reduces the need to learn special purpose data stores and provides the opportunity to bring mobile and web engagement data into analytic warehouses for greater user insights. Db2 optimizes retrieval of JSON data with index support, improving query performance.
IBM is extending Db2 with Hybrid Transactional / Analytical Processing (HTAP) with the rollout of a technical preview of BLU Acceleration in-memory secondary index support. IBM Db2’s use of the BLU Acceleration engine for HTAP avoids the standard practice of replicating data, decreasing memory requirements and latency versus rival databases.
Secondary indices will improve performance of some queries for operational data store and analytic warehouses, as well as OLTP and HTAP workloads.
The company has also enhanced DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS with Hybrid Transactional and Analytics Processing (HTAP) capabilities to provide improved real-time processing and simplicity for applications by removing the need to manage latency in the data replication process.
Meanwhile, IBM announced new data governance solutions and tools, data science and machine learning advances to help developers and analysts tap cognitive computing.
IBM also formed the Open Data Governance Consortium for Apache Atlas, dedicated to advancing the open framework for data governance.
Research firm IDC predicts that by 2018, 75 percent of all developers will embed cognitive in their applications. As data volumes increase, and data protection regulation mounts, the ability to effectively manage and exploit that data diminishes.
If organizations, which are within or outside of Europe, fail to comply with GDPR could potentially face extremely stiff financial penalties that will range from four percent of the organization’s annual global revenue to 20 million euros.
Meanwhile, IBM and telecom operator Zain launched a new cloud disaster recovery service that will provide IBM and Zain’s enterprise customers with cloud-based business continuity capabilities and faster disaster recovery of their critical IT systems, without incurring the infrastructure expense of a second physical site.
