Due to its operational challenges, the Ministry sought out alternative approaches to managing its Db2 for z/OS workloads. In 2016, it began a workload assessment of the IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS. “Our goal was to find a way to offload most of the CPU-consuming queries to the Db2 Analytics Accelerator to address operational concern. For some applications, we made minor changes, and for other applications, we were able to run with no changes,” says Mohammed. In 2017, the Ministry began implementing the Db2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS 5, connecting it to its production system.
When IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator 7 was released, the Ministry decided to upgrade to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities and performance of the new version. “We had some complex queries, complex statistics and analytics, fancy dashboards, which we were not able to produce for our internal customers,” says Mohammed. “We were relying on workarounds like moving tables and data.” IBM Services® helped the Ministry migrate to the new version of the Db2 Analytics Accelerator.
Version 7 of the Db2 Analytics Accelerator includes an advanced data synchronization technology called Integrated Synchronization. This feature, which replaces Change Data Capture, supports a deeper integration between Db2 for z/OS and the Db2 Analytics Accelerator. This results in reduced latency between the two database engines so queries and jobs can now run against the most current transactional data.
The new version of the Db2 Analytics Accelerator has helped reduce the amount of SQL tuning required. “We spend less time tuning complex SQL queries,” says Mohammed. “The results are amazing without any tuning. It’s very easy from the operational side.”