What is IBM Z Table Accelerator?

A full featured table manager, IBM Z® Table Accelerator is specifically designed to enable the rapid development of applications that require processing of many table lookups. It manages tables in memory and allows multiple users to concurrently read, modify and permanently store data.

IBM Z Table Accelerator is a software tool that helps companies improve the performance of their mainframe applications by reducing the I/O usage and CPU cycle consumption inherent with database access. IBM Z Table Accelerator optimizes your applications using indexes and access algorithms designed for in-memory use. The immediate benefit is faster running applications; a secondary, but no less valuable benefit is a reduced urgency and scale of future hardware upgrades. As mainframe upgrades become necessary due to increased demands on your data, powering your applications with IBM Z Table Accelerator will reduce the required scale and expense of any planned upgrade.

For just about any mainframe program, IBM Z Table Accelerator can speed processing. For example, the traditional approach to mainframe data processing, illustrated in Figure 1, involves many database accesses for every transaction.

Figure 1. Traditional approach used for transaction processing

IBM Z Table Accelerator takes a different approach. First, an empty table is defined in memory. The appropriate data is then extracted and loaded into the empty table in memory. Without the need of further I/O, this consolidated data is reorganized, or sorted, in memory as required for transaction processing. Program logic is simplified and execution performance dramatically improved by eliminating large amounts of I/O and sorting smaller sets of data. IBM Z Table Accelerator manages data totally in memory, without any I/O or sort-in/sort-out files. This dramatic savings in EXCPs is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. IBM Z Table Accelerator approach used for transaction processing

IBM Z Table Accelerator is a complete infrastructure for defining, building, maintaining, controlling and using table data. Application performance and productivity can be improved by placing tables with these types of data into memory.

For some applications, a large number of accesses are performed against a small percentage of data. Similarly, a small portion of data is directly responsible for a large part of the maintenance effort for an application. That small percentage of data is what IBM Z Table Accelerator has been explicitly designed to manage — more efficiently and more completely than any other product.

IBM Z Table Accelerator is a complement to your existing technology. It is specifically designed to deal with memory-resident tables, therefore helping with performance and productivity issues relating to tables. Data that must reside in external files are better handled by a DBMS and data that requires mostly read access can reside in memory-resident tables and be handled by IBM Z Table Accelerator.