IBM
Two autonomic highpoints in DB2 8.2 are the IBM Learning Optimizer announced its first major database
refresh in almost two years with new features from the company’s autonomic
computing vault.
Fresh out of beta testing,
DB2 Universal Database 8.2 is loaded with automatic self-managing and self-tuning features that
promise to go beyond what rivals Oracle and Microsoft
currently provide in their database products.
According to Jeff Jones, director of strategy DB2 Information Management
Software, DB2 8.2 should be attractive to customers because of the wealth of
new features in the finished product that allow database administrators to
attend to other tasks in the data center.
Autonomic computing, the company’s technology for helping
computer systems self-manage and regulate themselves, is at the forefront of the new technologies in the product,
formerly code-named Stinger.
Jones said DB2 8.2, which runs on Windows, Unix, and Linux, marks the one-hundredth IBM product release with
autonomic computing technologies, of which the concern has 415 total
features in 50 products.
While that might not mean much for the industry on the whole, it means a lot
to IBM, which is using autonomic computing as a way to become a
major force in the on-demand computing market.
Self-managing features play a big part in on-demand computing, which calls
for less hands-on activity from technical administrators and more automated
software functions to keep infrastructure running in tip-top shape.
“Everything must be a whole lot easier to administer and easier to integrate
with other middleware components,” Jones told
internetnews.com. “You need this automation to make middleware
something that sticks together and requires less attention from the
customers. This is what the on-demand operating environment is about and
where DB2 fits.”
(LEO), which Jones said allows the database to “learn” from past experiences
and accelerate searches by uncovering the fastest route to information, and
DB2 Design Advisor, a tool that automatically designs and optimizes the
database.
LEO also continually updates query statistics about the database’s
performance and how it is being used. Moreover, searches that once took days
to complete can be done in seconds with LEO, a more intuitive software
program than other search tools.
As for competing tuning technologies from Oracle and Microsoft, Jones
asserted that those databases force administrators to constantly tell the
database how to optimize queries. LEO and Design Advisor tune the database
on demand as the workload fluctuates.
This frees up database administrators to complete query jobs nearly seven
times faster than they can be done manually. The new version also performs automatic
maintenance updates, including data back-ups.
New research from Meta Group notes that autonomic software can help
reduce time-consuming tasks by up to 80 percent. This is crucial at a time
when manpower in IT departments is lower than it has been in the last
several years.
DB2 8.2 will be generally available September 17 and will start at
$500 per processor for the DB2 Express version and $25,000 per processor for DB2 Enterprise edition.