The IBM Db2 LUW team is proud to announce the availability of its latest update – Db2 v11.5.5.
This version is our second major release in less than six months; it is available on-premises, on containers with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data, and soon on IBM Db2 on Cloud offerings. The team has been hard at work to ensure that we establish a regular cadence across our Db2 portfolio. With this release, we have a host of new exciting capabilities as well as improvements to existing features that we can’t wait for our customers to enjoy.
The team has been strategically working on delivering capabilities around three distinct pillars. We think of it as our promise to ensure successful deployments for Db2 everywhere.
- AI-ready: Db2 is the AI database. We have relentlessly innovated over the years to bring pragmatic AI capabilities to the database. Db2 not only supports a large variety of AI workloads but uses AI itself to improve upon traditional database use cases.
- Developer inclusivity: Db2 is for developers. The Db2 team has been actively working to improve all aspects of developer and database administrator interactions — whether it is tools, drivers, or improving the download experience.
- Resilience and enterprise-grade: The world’s most advanced database workloads run on Db2. Security, scalability, and resiliency are part of our DNA. This seemingly obvious pillar is at the core of ensuring our customer’s success.
AI for enterprise
This release marks the completion of phase two for our machine learning (ML) Query Optimizer, and the results are highly encouraging. We are able to use a self-learning AI model to determine the most efficient query execution path. The performance improvements speak for themselves, as we are seeing up to 10x on common query types (query performance improvement based on internal testing).
The latest ML Query Optimizer uses models to learn from experience and improves decisions using feedback from query execution and statistics. It applies machine learning to better estimate cardinalities and predicate filtering — key to better query performance. All these features result in highly optimized use of memory and compute resources and still deliver up to 10 times faster query performance. We are looking forward to replacing the traditional query cost optimization with this AI-driven approach in the very near future.
If you are interested in learning more about how to try this out within your environment, check out the webinar “Db2 is AI-ready.”
Developer inclusivity
The Db2 Data Management Console provides a unified experience across all Db2 deployments — whether on-premises or on cloud. DBAs can monitor hundreds of databases from a single pane of glass. They can explore and manage database objects, including tables, schemas, and stored procedures. We have even integrated a SQL editor to write and run queries directly from within the console. Most importantly, the entire console is extensible with RESTful services.
The team was humbled to receive the prestigious Red Dot Design 2020 award for this user interface when it was launched on our IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud offering earlier this year. We couldn’t be more excited to bring it to all our Db2 users.
Our teams have been hard at work ensuring developers and administrators have access to the right set of tools where they work. VS Code is the one of the most common development environments, and we are excited to announce the latest release of our Db2 Connect extension for the VS Code platform. This new release brings in several highly requested features, such as support for stored procedures, UDFs, connector manager, and export to CSV, JSON and XML.
We have also introduced updates to several drivers, including .NET, Java, Ruby, and Python. We have a great session that covers developer enhancement in details including updates to the REST API: “Db2 is Developer-Inclusive”
Resilience and enterprise-grade
With this release, we have made major strides in improving all aspects of interest for customers interested in cloud native deployments. Db2 is the first major database fully certified on Red Hat OpenShift to deliver a true hybrid experience. This allows customers to have unprecedented flexibility to deploy on the infrastructure of their choice, whether it is on-premises, dedicated appliance, or an IaaS platform like IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Customers can rest assured they have the flexibility to deploy on their cloud vendor of choice and can always migrate their data estates seamlessly when needed.
Combined with the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform, containerized Db2 can also deliver integrated governance through our best-in-class governance solution, Watson Knowledge Catalog, as well as our ML model training and development environment, Watson Studio.
Of course, no Db2 release would be complete without us improving our commitment to SAP customers. With continued support and improvements for our SAP customers, Db2 v11.5.5 is no exception. This year, we renewed our commitment to support SAP for another 10 years — until 2030!
We have made it easier than ever before to get started with Db2 on Cloud for FREE. We hope you are just as excited as we are about the new Db2 and look forward to hearing your feedback.