Initially, Cerebos’ team of database administrators (DBA) was skeptical about the claim that BLU Acceleration could both dramatically increase query speeds and eliminate the need for DBAs to create and manage indexes to optimize performance.
“Many times, the claims that database vendors make about performance turn out to be too good to be true,” says Mark Minard. “We wanted to be sure that BLU Acceleration was more than just smoke and mirrors, so we asked IBM for a demo license and ran some rigorous tests. The results were truly impressive: for the first report we tested, we saw a leap in performance from 4 minutes 13 seconds down to just 47 seconds. Better still, we didn’t need to make any changes to the report itself, or create any indexes in the database. It just worked.”
Based on positive trials, Cerebos upgraded to IBM Db2 v11.1, which would allow the DBA team to put the BLU Acceleration capability into production. Working with Datasync Consulting, the team converted its entire general ledger—comprising over 90 million rows of data—from a traditional row-based table structure to column-oriented tables that unlock the power of BLU Acceleration.
“From a traditional relational database mindset, the theory behind BLU Acceleration is quite difficult to grasp at first,” says Mark Minard. “But in terms of actually installing the software, converting your tables and getting your queries running, it’s very straightforward. The documentation from IBM is very good, and Datasync Consulting did an excellent job of getting us up to speed.”
Taking a safety-first approach, Cerebos ran the new environment in parallel with its old database architecture for a month, to compare results.
Mark Minard comments: “The results we saw in production matched what we saw during the proof of concept—and we also saw some improvements that we hadn’t been expecting. Loading times for our data warehouse dropped by 20 percent, even though it typically takes slightly longer to load a columnar table than a row-based table. It shows that BLU Acceleration isn’t the only improvement that IBM has made to Db2 over the past few years; simply upgrading from version 9.7 to version 11.1 has given us better performance across the board.”