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IBM Data Management magazine
New release boosts legendary speed, adds tools, and makes development easier than ever
You would have to travel a long way to find a DBMS as fast and reliable as IBM IMS—it has been the heart of some of the world's largest businesses for many years. Now, IMS 12 opens a new chapter in helping businesses thrive. The new release is designed to reduce operating costs, simplify programming, and help businesses grow through better capacity and performance.
To help cut operating costs, IMS can now take advantage of reduced CPU consumption, which can lower cost per transaction. With the addition of TCP/IP support, IMS allows technicians to connect to two IMS systems in an IMS Multiple Systems Coupling network, expanding communication and helping to reduce network costs. The new Resource Access Control Facility codes can improve security as well.
To simplify programming, IBM added a variety of standard tools and streamlined interfaces that help technicians extend IMS access and both modernize and speed deployment. A new visualization tool called IMS Explorer makes it easy to bring new DBAs and technicians up to speed. IMS Explorer provides a graphical display of database structures, indexes, and logical relationships, which in turn helps simplify the analysis of application and data impact.
IBM also included new dynamic definitions to help streamline operations. New IMS and
IMS Connect QUERY and UPDATE
commands enhance availability, while better problem analysis and enhanced
reliability, availability, and serviceability help increase data quality.
IMS 12 includes autonomic response, recovery, and tuning capabilities designed to reduce the number of planned outages and increase uptime. At the same time, newly expanded reliability and diagnostics tools help ensure resilience and availability.
At companies that depend on speed and reliability, IMS is already a legend. With IMS 12, the hierarchical DBMS is poised to help businesses achieve new heights.
MORE INFORMATION:ibm.com/ims
Netezza Appliance Raises the Stakes
High-capacity appliance can handle more than 10 petabytes of data
Having spent years creating stores of data, companies need ways to analyze and protect all that archived information. To help companies tackle this challenge, Netezza recently announced the IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance. It can analyze more than 10 PB of data, archived or current, as well as double as a disaster recovery target for other data warehousing systems.
Using the new appliance, banks, insurance companies, healthcare organizations, and communications service providers—all of which amass huge amounts of data—now have the capability to conduct cost-effective SQL querying and analysis of archival data, whether to comply with regulations or to spot patterns of activity. Businesses can more easily sift through current and archival data such as banking and mobile phone transactions, insurance claims, electronic medical records, and sales information. Companies can also analyze this information to reveal emerging trends in consumer sentiment, product safety, and sales and marketing effectiveness.
Among the first companies to use the Netezza High Capacity Appliance: Kelley Blue Book, which tracks prices, values, and expert and consumer reviews on new and used vehicles. It will use the appliance to analyze clickstream data created by visitors surfing the company's website to discern which topics they cared most about, such as used and new vehicle prices, safety recall and warranty data, and vehicle buyer reviews.
IBM has added support for the Netezza High Capacity Appliance to IBM InfoSphere Information Server for Data Warehousing V8.5, enabling organizations to blueprint, discover, transform, and load information sources into the Netezza appliance.
MORE INFORMATION
netezza.com/data-warehouse-appliance-products/high-capacity-appliance.aspx
ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/info-server/data-warehousing
Cloudera Connector for Netezza
At the Netezza Enzee Universe user conference in June, Cloudera, a developer of Hadoop-based data management software and services, announced the availability of the Cloudera Connector for IBM Netezza appliances. This connector allows Netezza users to derive highly specific analytical insights from large unstructured data within Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH), Cloudera Enterprise service, and their respective support and management tools.
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HiT Software Announces Informix Support
With version 7.1 of its popular change data capture product DBMoto, HiT Software announced support for the IBM Informix database. According to the company, DBMoto can now be embedded in enterprise data management environments as well as external data integration projects. IT teams, Informix DBAs, ISVs, and systems integrators can use the product's new open APIs to easily add change data capture functionality to their architecture within their application interfaces.
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IBM InfoSphere BigInsights V1.3
Version 1.3 of InfoSphere BigInsights brings the power of Hadoop to the enterprise with new capabilities that offer greater reliability, performance, and efficiency. Compression technologies provide the ability to transparently compress data on disk to decrease disk space and storage infrastructure requirements. And IBM Research adapted the industrial-strength distributed file system GPFS to work in the BigInsights Hadoop model of a shared-nothing cluster, providing enterprises with a high-performance, high-availability, and more secure alternative to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). BigInsights also now includes Adaptive MapReduce, which helps speed up small jobs by changing how MapReduce tasks are handled without altering how jobs are created. Adaptive MapReduce is transparent to MapReduce operations and to Hadoop API operations.
MORE INFORMATION
ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/biginsights
IBM InfoSphere Information Server 8.7
The latest release of InfoSphere Information Server improves the operational management and governability of integration projects and information infrastructure. Version 8.7 features interactive debugging to accelerate troubleshooting and problem resolution; easy access to operational metadata through a new operations console; simplified compliance tracking through InfoSphere Blueprint Director; and improved visibility for data flows and data lineage through tighter links with InfoSphere Metadata Workbench.
MORE INFORMATION
ibm.com/software/data/integration/info_server
You Have Questions, We Have Answers
Do you want to know how IBM products stack up against the competition? Do you want to hear directly from experts who implement real-world solutions every day? Do you want to get answers for your own questions? If you answered yes to any of these queries, then visit SmarterQuestions.org .
SmarterQuestions.org is an IBM-sponsored site where experts from IBM and elsewhere answer today's critical IT questions. The only rules: keep the answers real. If you prefer buzz to buzzwords, come add your viewpoint to the mix.
Independent Analysis: IBM Smart Analytics System—A Cost-Effective Choice
In June, International Technology Group (ITG) conducted a cost-benefit analysis of enterprise warehouse solutions, comparing IBM Smart Analytics System 7700 with similar products from Teradata and Oracle. The report, "Cost/Benefit Case for Enterprise Warehouse Solutions," stated that "based on relative performance for complex mixed workload environments, IBM Smart Analytics System is a clear leader in cost-effectiveness. In certain configurations offering approximately the same performance, initial Smart Analytics System 7700 costs—including hardware and software acquisition and installation—are 11 percent less than for Oracle Exadata Database Machine and 16 percent less than for Teradata Active EDW 6650 equivalents. However, disparities are significantly larger if three-year costs—including maintenance and support, database administration (DBA) personnel, and facilities (energy and computer room occupancy)—are compared. Three-year costs for Smart Analytics System 7700 are 43 and 40 percent less than those for Oracle and Teradata systems respectively."
MORE INFORMATION
Cost/Benefit Case for Enterprise Warehouse Solutions. June 2011.
Independent Analysis: IBM Comes Out a Leader
A recent analyst report highlighted the viability of an IBM product in a key category: real-time database protection. In "The Forrester Wave: Database Auditing And Real-Time Protection, Q2 2011," Forrester Research evaluated database auditing and real-time protection vendors, using 147 criteria. The report singled out IBM—along with two other players—for "their strong user activity auditing, policy management, real-time protection, and application support capabilities as well as their forward-thinking strategies."
Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna noted in the report that because this market is rife with mature products, organizations should base their purchase decisions on the availability of "more cutting-edge functionality," including real-time attack activity blocking, privileged-user monitoring, drill-down analytics, and the presence of a centralized repository. Yuhanna cited the 2009 acquisition of Guardium as a key reason why Forrester placed IBM in a leader position in the Forrester Wave: "IBM InfoSphere Guardium continues to demonstrate its leadership in supporting very large heterogeneous environments, delivering high performance and scalability, simplifying administration, and performing real-time database protection."
MORE INFORMATION
This autumn brings a cornucopia of new releases for developing, enhancing, and managing databases
IBM Data Studio 3.1: This package simplifies development and administration for DB2 and Informix clients by consolidating Data Studio, InfoSphere Optim Database Administrator, and InfoSphere Optim Development Studio into a single Eclipse-based offering. Data Studio is the centerpiece for the strategic replacement of DB2 Control Center, DB2 Developer Workbench, and DB2 Optimization Services Center. It gives developers and DBAs important tools for development, debugging, and deployment. Data Studio 3.1 also sports a new change management user interface for multi-object change management with dependency identification, data preservation, and undo script generation to save time and reduce errors. For DB2 for z/OS users, it adds support for defining and accessing DB2 10 temporal tables and RUNSTATS feature exploitation supporting autonomic statistics.
IBM InfoSphere Optim Configuration Manager 2.1: This brand-new tool centralizes management of database configurations with registration of key database information. You can discover enterprise data assets using information gleaned from database application clients and leverage client definition as a central registry for database connectivity with IBM InfoSphere and InfoSphere Optim tools. In addition, the new release helps maintain appropriate configuration of data servers and data clients such that application performance and availability objectives are met and sustained.
IBM InfoSphere Optim pureQuery Runtime 3.1: This runtime environment helps boost performance, simplifies deployment, and provides new features such as nested query beans, which ease application development by generating Java artifacts that handle results from SQL queries involving joins. Release 3.1 delivers performance enhancements, including capture modes and logging approaches with reduced overhead. Developers can now also easily move pureQuery-based applications from test to production environments, streamlining deployment.
IBM InfoSphere Data Architect V7.6: New capabilities help improve productivity and usability while supporting more platform choices. For example, users can develop and customize reports through a wizard-based approach. Developers will benefit from support for Java pluglets, which can be used to extend common model management tasks. Platform support has been improved for Oracle data structures and types and extended to DB2 10 for z/OS and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R1 and R2.
IBM InfoSphere Optim Query Workload Tuner 3.1: Now available for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, this set of tools and advisors provides expert recommendations to both developers and DBAs to help improve performance for a workload (a group of queries). Developers can launch InfoSphere Optim Query Workload Tuner from Data Studio 3.1 and gain immediate insight into performance enhancements during development. The Statistics Advisor, Query Advisor, Index Advisor, Access Plan Explorer, and more provide enhanced insight into workloads.
MORE INFORMATION
ibm.com/software/data/infosphere
Books: IBM History: Milestones and Masterstrokes
To help celebrate IBM's centennial, IBM Press released Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company (ibmpressbooks.com/title/0132755106). Written by journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey O'Brien and based on interviews with many IBM executives, inventors, and innovators, the book chronicles the Nobel Prize–winning work of the company's research laboratories, incorporating archival material such as hundreds of vintage photographs and drawings. The book also recounts the company's business history: its missteps as well as its successes, ranging from the bet-the-business gamble on the legendary System/360 in the 1960s to the turnaround from the company's near-death experience in the early 1990s.
IBM DB2 Workshop for Oracle Professionals
IBM is offering a technical workshop at no charge for Oracle database professionals who want to quickly and easily enhance their DB2 skills. Designed specifically for Oracle and other database practitioners, this three-day session covers the latest PL/SQL compatibility features in DB2 9.7. These compatibility features make it easier than ever before to extend existing database and PL/SQL knowledge to DB2.
After completing this training, database professionals will be able to better support an expanded set of platforms; more easily enable applications for DB2; and leverage the automation, scalability, and reliability features of DB2. The workshop includes certification testing at no charge.
To register, visit ibm.com/db2workshop. If your city is not currently listed, use the sign-up link to be notified when a local date is available.
Certification and Training: IBM Information On Demand 2011
Complimentary Certification Exams
All IOD 2011 attendees are eligible for three complimentary exams at the conference, including all Information Management, Business Analytics, and Enterprise Content Management exams.
MORE INFORMATION
These courses will be offered only on Sunday, October 23, 2011, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Take advantage of special IOD attendee pricing of US$499 and learn from professional IBM instructors and IBM Champions.
- DB2 10 for z/OS Database Administration Certification Crammer (Exam 730 and 612)
- DB2 10 for z/OS System Administrator Certification Crammer (Exam 617)
- DB2 9.7 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows DBA Certification Crammer (Exam 541)
- InfoSphere DataStage 8.5 Certification Crammer (Exam 421)
- InfoSphere QualityStage 8.5 Certification Crammer (Exam 422)
- InfoSphere BigInsights Essentials Crammer (Mastery Test M97)
- Deep Dive into DB2 LUW Problem Determination and Troubleshooting
MORE INFORMATION
IBM partners and clients who want to expand their skills can save 50 percent on IBM Software Professional Certification tests, available at events in select cities around the world.
MORE INFORMATION
InfoSphere QualityStage 8.5 Certification
For those who want to certify their expertise as a data quality developer, analyst, and architect, this exam contains six sections totaling approximately 62 multiple-choice questions.
MORE INFORMATION
InfoSphere BigInsights Essentials Course and Mastery Test
This new two-day training course is for system administrators and developers responsible for managing Apache Hadoop.
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Self-paced virtual courses (SPVCs) are online classes that include the same quality content, exercises, and hands-on labs as IBM classroom courses. New SPVCs include:
- Informix Internal Architecture (ID: 2X911)
- IBM Red Brick Warehouse Administration V6.30 (ID: 2X500)
MORE INFORMATION
Table of contents
- IMS 12: Farther and faster
- Netezza Appliance Raises the Stakes
- IBM Partner News
- New Releases
- Independent Analysis: IBM Smart Analytics System—A Cost-Effective Choice
- Independent Analysis: IBM Comes Out a Leader
- Rev Up Your Database Tools
- IBM DB2 Workshop for Oracle Professionals
- Certification and Training: IBM Information On Demand 2011
- IBM Software Certification
- About the author
- Comments
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