Introduction to Object Storage

IBM® Db2® Warehouse as a Service in AWS includes the support of Native Object Storage within its managed service and comes configured to directly exploit this feature.

IBM Db2 Warehouse as a Service in Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduces native object storage support to Db2, allowing users to store in object storage traditional Db2 column-organized tables in Db2's native format while maintaining the existing SQL support and performance using a tiered storage architecture.

Object storage, often referred to as object-based storage, is a data storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and reliable durable file storage (e.g. network-attached block storage, like AWS EBS) which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks.

This kind of storage architecture has been mostly popularized with the introduction of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in the AWS Cloud, as a result of offering a level of scalability and availability not possible with traditional file or block-based storage, in addition to a significant reduction of cost as a result of the level of scale that only a cloud service can provide.