Up and Running with DB2 for Linux
ISBN : 0738427675
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Copyright © Whei-Jen Chen, Rav Ahuja, Louisa Ford, Paul Jud, Kang Yong Ying
Introduction
With a wide spectrum of offerings and capabilities, DB2 for Linux allows you to access, manage, and analyze all forms of information across the enterprise. DB2 gives you a robust, easy-to-manage database that offers high performance, complementing the stability and reliability of Linux. Industry leading parallel technologies in DB2 make it one of the most scalable and powerful databases in production today, and when combined with Linux clusters, it allows you to manage mission-critical data at a cost lower than other enterprise class databases.
DB2 for Linux can be downloaded from the Web site http://ibm.com/db2/v8, and visit http://ibm.com/db2/linux for further information. This chapter introduces DB2 Universal Database (UDB) Version 8 and its offerings for Linux, and provides an overview of the DB2 environment and its parallelism with Linux. Along with an overview, the following topics are covered:
DB2 for Linux offerings
– Features
– Supported platforms
– Products and packages
DB2 environment
– Deployment topologies
– DB2 database objects
Parallelism with DB2
– SMP environments
– Database clusters
– Partitioned databases
1.1 Overview
It was not too long ago that Linux servers were being used primarily in the academic and scientific domain. In just a few short years, Linux has earned the designation of being one of the fastest growing server operating platforms and is becoming increasingly pervasive in the enterprise. Its openness, flexibility, and ability to lower cost of ownership are just some of the factors that have contributed to this operating system's phenomenal success in the commercial arena of e-business systems. Once relegated to running infrastructure tasks like file and Web serving, Linux has now found its way into the enterprise datacenter. Many companies have moved beyond the initial phases of experimentation and testing and are now reaping the benefits of deploying mission critical applications and databases with Linux and DB2.
IBM DB2 Universal Database has long been known for its technology leadership. Therefore, it was not surprising when IBM took the lead in bringing DB2's proven performance, scalability, and ease of use features to Linux. Over the years DB2 has kept up its lead by releasing the first database for clustered environments on Linux, showcasing the first commercial database for Intel and AMD powered 64-bit platforms, and continually being first to announce industry leading benchmarks on Linux. IBM's commitment to Linux is further reflected through its ongoing efforts to exploit and enhance the Linux kernel for database workloads. As a result IBM is the market leader on Linux for relational database systems1.
The reasons why major companies and governments around the globe choose to deploy DB2 for Linux in the enterprise setting are quite simple. DB2's rich set of features have been running on Linux almost four years and during this time while the Linux kernel matured through the efforts of thousands of programmers and volunteers, the IBM teams were busy further hardening the kernel and DB2 on Linux for enterprise workloads. Today DB2 is the most versatile and powerful database on Linux and capable of effectively handling terabytes of data in both decision support and transactional environments. The combination of DB2 and Linux is a robust database platform for a variety of solutions and vertical applications, including:
Back-end for Web and application servers
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Transactional enterprise systems
Enterprise applications like ERP, CRM, SCM
Information Integration and Content Management
Gateway to mainframe and host data
Retail, financial, public sector and manufacturing applications
Life sciences and bio-informatics solutions
Store for spatial and geographical systems
High Performance Computing applications including:
- – Financial modeling
- – Oil and gas exploration
- – Research and scientific
Despite implementing a wide array of solutions in different industries, customers of DB2 for Linux generally talk about a few common themes regarding the benefits they derive. Foremost among them is the exceptional value that DB2 for Linux delivers. Not only is DB2 known for lower initial cost, it also provides the lowest long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to other databases from Microsoft and Oracle2. Running DB2 on the open Linux platform and Intel or AMD processor-based servers or blades delivers an even more compelling price/performance story. DB2 is renowned for critical self-tuning and self-healing features. The Self Managing and Resource Tuning (SMART) technologies make DB2 easy to use and maintain while minimizing administration costs. IBM's alliances with all the major Linux distributors and the ability to get 24x7 support for both DB2 and Linux directly from IBM provides added piece of mind.
The following sections will provide an overview of DB2's features and product offerings available on Linux as well as the different architectures for deploying the product in the enterprise.