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A major upgrade to Db2® Warehouse on IBM Cloud®

26 June 2024

2 min read

We’re thrilled to announce a major upgrade to Db2® Warehouse on IBM Cloud®, which introduces several new capabilities that make Db2 Warehouse even more performant, capable, and cost-effective.

Here’s what’s new

Up to 34 times cheaper storage costs

The next generation of Db2 Warehouse introduces support for Db2 column-organized tables in Cloud Object Storage. Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud customers can now store massive datasets on a resilient, highly scalable storage tier, costing up to 34x less.

Up to 4 times better query performance

Our advanced caching technology, which is combined with data in Object Storage, helps customers improve performance by up to 4 times compared to the previous generation of Db2 Warehouse. These are exciting enhancements. For more details, check out the new performance blog for an outline of the various improvements that were made to the engine.

Open-table and open-data formats

Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud now natively supports the Iceberg open-table format that is stored on open data formats such as Parquet, AVRO and ORC. This enables Db2 Warehouse to natively ingest, query and export open-format data, facilitating seamless integration with the broader data ecosystem.

Integration with IBM watsonx.data™

Db2 Warehouse integrates seamlessly with watsonx.data, IBM’s flagship lakehouse product. This allows customers to augment existing workloads across hybrid cloud environments and run fit-for-purpose engines that best meet their workload and price-performance needs.

Better scalability, security and resiliency with IBM Cloud VPC Gen2

Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud is deployed on the latest IBM Cloud VPC Gen2, a highly resilient and scalable cloud platform. This deployment uses IBM’s cutting-edge hardware, delivering high network performance, ultra-fast NVMe storage, improved block storage performance and enhanced security through VPC Security Groups.

Improvements to the Db2 Engine

This release also brings significant enhancements to the Db2 engine, including improvements to the native Cloud Object Storage (NCOS) caching engine, federation, security and availability. For a comprehensive list of improvements, read here.

There’s even more to Db2 Warehouse:

  • Fully managed cloud data warehouse: Customers can now scale their Db2 Warehouse instance up to 5760 vCPUs per cluster, significantly extending the scale and scope of their deployments.
  • Storage auto-increase for Block Storage: For customers relying on block storage, the new release offers the ability to set auto-increase thresholds, ensuring that you never run out of storage for your workloads.
  • Granular, schema-level backup/restore: Db2 Warehouse now provides comprehensive backup capabilities, including the ability to take granular, schema-level backups. This offers greater control when designing your backup strategy.
  • Integration with IBM AppID: Db2 Warehouse now integrates with IBM AppID for easy integration with Azure Active Directory.
  • New APIs: We are launching new APIs for scaling, updates, backup, restore and logging, further simplifying the administration of your Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud instance.

Start your free trial today

Start a Db2 Warehouse free trial and receive USD1000 in free credits to test drive a Db2 Warehouse SaaS instance! New to an IBM Cloud account? Sign up today and receive USD200 extra credit upon creating an IBM Cloud account.

Customers running Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud, software or analytics appliances can seamlessly modernize to the next generation of Db2 Warehouse on IBM Cloud with like-for-like compatibility with their existing deployment.

 

Author

Aniruddha Joshi

Senior Product Manager

Data & AI Software