Introduction to Object Storage

Native Cloud Object Storage is supported on user-managed environments on Db2® Warehouse 11.5.9.

Important: Only the current generation of plans hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) include Native Cloud Object Storage support.

Db2 Warehouse 11.5.9 introduces native object storage support to Db2. Native Cloud Object Storage (NCOS) is a data storage architecture that offers scalability levels beyond traditional file or block-based storage.

Native Cloud Object Storage allows users to store data in traditional column-organized tables in Db2 format while maintaining full SQL compatibility 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 such as file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, or reliable durable file storage (network-attached block storage such as AWS EBS), which manage data as blocks within sectors and tracks.

Data storage architecture has been popularized with the introduction of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in the AWS Cloud, offering a level of scalability and availability that is not possible with traditional file or block-based storage. Object-based architecture also offers a significant cost reduction for high performance and a scalability level that only a cloud service can provide.