DB2 goes big and mobile

So where’s all the excitement in computing these days? If your answer is Big Data and mobile apps then you’ll be fascinated by the latest DB2-related news.

Let’s start at the big end. IBM announced DB2 Version 10.5 recently and included in it are a set of acceleration technologies code-named BLU – apparently standing for Big data, Lightning fast, and Ultra easy! BLU is a bundle of new techniques for columnar processing, data deduplication, parallel vector processing, and data compression – everything you’d need if you were working on Big Data in memory.

So, BLU enables databases to be “memory optimized” – which means that they will run in memory, but not everything has to be put in memory. BLU has also removed the need for hand-tuning SQL queries to optimize performance.

IBM is saying that this new version of DB2 can speed up data analysis by over 25 times. That means databases don’t need to be sized so they everything fits in memory, and there’s no need to purchase separate in-memory databases for fast data analysis and transaction processing jobs. IBM has been showing an example of a 32-core system using BLU technology executing a query against a 10TB data set in less than a second.

This kind of processing ability makes DB2 a better choice in some cases than using Hadoop. The data is compressed in the order in which it is stored, allowing predicate operations to be executed without decompressing the data set. The software also keeps a metadata table that lists the high and low key values for each data page or column of data. The advantage of this is that when a query is executed, the database can check whether any of the required values are on the data page.

IBM is using BLU in its DB2 SmartCloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to add power for data analysis and data reporting jobs.

Meanwhile, DB2 and MongoDB are getting together to announce a new standard to make it easier for organizations to implement data-intensive apps for the Web and mobile devices. MongoDB, you say, what’s that? MongoDB is owned by 10gen and utilizes NoSQL database technology. It’s used for lots of mobile and Web apps.

Developers will be able to use Eclipse tools with IBM Worklight Studio to integrate MongoDB APIs using the MongoDB query language. That allows developers to more easily query JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) documents in DB2. JSON documents are frequently used for storing Web-based data. A NoSQL database allows data to be added without a predefined schema and allows a wider range of choices when scaling up.

The plan is that later this year developers will be able to combine the WebSphere eXtreme Scale data grid platform with MongoDB, and they’ll be able to run MongoDB apps directly on DB2. Developers will be able to write apps using MongoDB’s query language to interact with data stored in DB2 and WebSphere, making the vast amount of data in IBM data stores available to modern application environments. IBM hopes to broaden the API and is already working on open source code for security, extended transaction support, and extended join support, among others.

So DB2 is growing at the big end of the database world and the little (mobile) end. Interesting!