A Different Approach to Cloud Data Warehousing

14 February 2023

2 min read

Explore the third generation of IBM Db2 Warehouse.

Data warehouses are mission-critical assets for your business to make quick, real-time decisions; but it’s not news that analytics on massive quantities of data has always been expensive. Customers turned to cloud data warehouses as a way to drive costs down with pay-as-you-go pricing. The new breed of cloud data warehouses allows you to start small and scale down your analytics environment when it’s not in use.

However, we know that the modern enterprise is a global operation running 24x7x365. We also know that data warehouses are mission-critical assets for enterprises to make quick, real-time business decisions with far-reaching consequences. And, we know that businesses today are just as cost-conscious as they’ve ever been.

 

IBM’s approach to data warehouses

We’re taking a different approach to cloud data warehousing with our third generation of IBM Db2 Warehouse. Here’s how:

  • We’ve cost-optimized the third generation of our cloud data warehouse for the always-on, mission-critical analytics workloads. We use inexpensive, cloud-native object storage (Amazon S3-based) to significantly reduce your storage costs while improving performance over traditional block-storage-based deployments. And, we’re building a new consumption model to match.
  • Once you are up and running, you have full control over how and when you choose to scale. The new IBM Db2 Warehouse completely de-couples storage and compute, allowing you to scale compute completely separately from the storage tier. The vast majority of your data will live in highly-scalable cloud object storage, with the option to land your row-organized data in block storage.
  • Data architectures have evolved and your business demands analytics on multitude of new data and table formats. That means your data warehouse must play nice with a wide array of other analytics engines accessing your data. With Db2 Warehouse, we’re introducing the ability to catalog, ingest, query and share using a variety of open table and data formats (such as Iceberg, Parquet, AVRO, ORC, CSV, JSON and more). All of this is made possible through Db2’s governed database engine that supports tight integration with your data lake over cloud object storage. In other words, we’re tightening our integration with your cloud data lake to bring you additional opportunities to cost optimize your analytics stack.

For additional information, you can also visit our IBM Db2 Warehouse website.

Author

Ani Joshi

Senior Product Manager, Db2, IBM Data & AI

Miran Badzak

Program Director, Databases