Today’s management executives are unaware of their exposure to and impact of the risks their companies face through overworked, overwhelmed and mistreated data handled by a data administration team that is hungry for any support to resolve the database availability, reliability and performance data issues they deal with every day. The following three ideas will help your management understand these vital and current data administration trends and database availability issues.

First, define when to get rid of old data to improve database availability and performance. Too often when new applications come to the data administration team, the application design has already been completed and the database schema is “thrown over the wall” to the DBAs to create and keep the database availability at 100%. When this happens to you, ask a simple question. “When do we get rid of the old data? Unfortunately, these days the answer you’ll probably get is “Never” or “Keep it forever.” While those answers may be appropriate for some health care, life insurance and government systems, it probably isn’t appropriate for the majority of business systems. A great place to find support for getting rid of old data is from the legal or compliance department. They can help your applications and executive management teams evaluate and understand the lawsuit risks of having the old data and will quickly help you resolve your discussion.

Next, plan alternative business processing to insure application database availability requirements are met. Too often application owners want 100% database availability and the DBAs are stuck managing the application database availability requirement in spite of poor database design issues. DB2 offers clones, table versioning, on-line reorganizations and HADR state of the art functions to provide high database availability options. The business needs to plan for outages for platform, hardware, software and other maintenance and even database structure changes. Discuss what transactions really require 100% database availability and how they can be processed during outages. Duplicate or mirrored databases, partial systems, leverage of disaster recovery sites and allowing limited functionality for minutes or even an hour can provide the maintenance window necessary to insure system reliability and database availability. Discuss these options with the application team immediately to get all operational aspects in place before any outage is required.

Third, define and write up a service level agreement (SLA). I have not seen a documented service level agreement for database availability or performance in years. Maybe your shop has this as a standard, but it is becoming a rare document. Below is a summary of one that I used a while ago. The supporting documentation for this database availability reliability and performance summary was over 15 pages of detailed application operational information. If your shop doesn’t have this type of documentation for each of its databases and applications, define these summary database availability SLAs as soon as possible and then follow them up with the details quickly. When maintenance is necessary, hardware fails or when disasters occur, you’ll be happy you documented your data administration’s commitments to database availability, reliability and performance.

Database availability, reliability, and performance happen through good database and application design. Unfortunately, the data volumes and speed requirements of new systems are not allowing time for good design. Document your data administration SLAs as soon as possible so your management can understand and mitigate the risks for all your old and new systems.

I will be speaking at the Heart of America DB2 Users Group on March 12 in Overland Kansas. (http://sites.google.com/site/hoadb2ug/announcements/march2012meeting).

I will be doing my new speech: Agile Big Data Analytics: Implementing a 22 Billion Row Data Warehouse

This presentation discusses the design, architecture, meta-data, performance and other experiences of building a big data and analytics data warehouse system. You will learn through this presentation the real life issues, agile development considerations, and solutions for building a data warehouse of 22+ billion rows in only six months.

This presentation will help you understand techniques to manage, design and leverage the big data issues for a more in-depth understanding of your business. Also the agile development processes will be detailed, showing how to uncovered complex analytics requirements and other issues early in the development cycle. This presentation will help you understand all these experiences that took processes from 37 hours to seconds so you can create a successful big data design and scalable data warehouse analytic architecture.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

Encouraging everyone to get to the new DB2 10 release is the fact that the bug rate is down compared to previous releases. While IBM acknowledges there are PMRs being worked on, the overall quality of DB2 10 is better than ever.

What was also interesting was that IBM talked about the common practices that can help customers successfully migrate to DB2 10. The following are the items that have worked for clients and these were confirmed within the IBM boot camp sessions.

First, plan for continued and on-going maintenance of your DB2 10 software. While the quality of DB2 10 is better than ever, there are still issues. No two shops are the same and your applications and programmers bring their unique complex problems to the environment. Stay up on your maintenance as much as possible and leverage any and all HIPER fixes. In fact, there is a new DB2 10 SUP tape available as of January 27 that has all the DB2 maintenance.

To stay up to date on all the information subscribe to the DB2 10 information APARS. The links are on my resources page and below.

II14477: DB2 9 MIGRATION/FALLBACK INFOAPAR TO/FROM DB2 10

II14474: DB2 V8 MIGRATION/FALLBACK INFOAPAR TO/FROM DB2 10

Next, make sure to test your applications in a true production like environment. Testing in a parallel production environment with similar volume of data, transaction rate and the various software levels for various interfaces is difficult. Be thorough and check every interface and all the unusual new Java, .NET and new open source framework applications especially to discover their impact early in the DB2 migration testing. Nothing is more important than uncovering software incompatibilities before production. If possible, use your previous migration application testing and enhance it with all the exotic features your applications have installed since then, like triggers, XML, stored procedures or third party software. Especially look at those non-standard, old or complex applications. IBM provides a number of pre-migration checklists. Get them at the links below and on my DB2 Resources web page.

V8 premigration checklist:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dzichelp/v2r2/topic/com.ibm.db2z10.doc.inst/src/tpc/db2z_premigr8checklist.htm

V8 migration checklist:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dzichelp/v2r2/topic/com.ibm.db2z10.doc.inst/src/tpc/db2z_migrcm8checklist.htm

V9 premigration checklist:

^© 2011 59 IBM Corporation

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dzichelp/v2r2/topic/com.ibm.db2z10.doc.inst/src/tpc/db2z_premigr9checklist.htm

V9 migration checklist:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dzichelp/v2r2/topic/com.ibm.db2z10.doc.inst/src/tpc/db2z_migrcm9checklist.htm

Third, and most important for your successful DB2 10 migration, is to make sure to give your company applications enough testing time. One of the best ways to do this is by starting out with the DB2 Migration plan available from the free IBM DB2 Migration seminars. Ask your IBM representative for them and use it as a starting point. Make your DB2 10 migration plans, communicate early and make sure to include time for third party software tool problems, application fixes and interface software upgrades. Start early and communicate often with all your resources, both inside and outside the company, that depend on the DB2 systems.

By doing these three things your DB2 10 migration can be a great experience for your team and your company.

I will be speaking at the Heart of America DB2 Users Group on March 12 in Overland Kansas. (http://sites.google.com/site/hoadb2ug/announcements/march2012meeting).

I will be doing my new speech: Agile Big Data Analytics: Implementing a 22 Billion Row Data Warehouse

This presentation discusses the design, architecture, meta-data, performance and other experiences of building a big data and analytics data warehouse system. You will learn through this presentation the real life issues, agile development considerations, and solutions for building a data warehouse of 22+ billion rows in only six months.

This presentation will help you understand techniques to manage, design and leverage the big data issues for a more in-depth understanding of your business. Also the agile development processes will be detailed, showing how to uncovered complex analytics requirements and other issues early in the development cycle. This presentation will help you understand all these experiences that took processes from 37 hours to seconds so you can create a successful big data design and scalable data warehouse analytic architecture.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

Since the purpose of this event is to train the IBM staff, there were several hands-on classes that helped everyone understand new features in the products. One of the hands-on classes that I attended was on the new IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator – IDAA. During this session we quickly configured the new IDAA appliance, defined and loaded tables that needed acceleration and enabled these new tables for consideration by the DB2 z/OS optimizer.

The performance improvement for these IDAA enabled DB2 z/OS tables was fantastic, returning results in seconds. IBM customers are experiencing dramatic 1000% or more improvements in query performance, taking queries from hours to seconds. This benefit is the result of incorporating the Netezza technology into the DB2 z/OS environment, dramatically improving “speed of thought” data warehousing experiences for end-users.

The data warehousing DB2 z/OS IDAA experience provides end-users with the ability to ask any question imaginable against their data and receive their answers at the “speed of thought.” This improved query performance can literally be against 10s or 100s of terabytes of data unlocking access for new types of questions for any type of business analytics.

The set up, configuration and production of result sets from these DB2 z/OS IDAA tables can literally happen in a couple of days. Since the DB2 z/OS IDAA solution is an appliance, it is quick to set up, configure, load and query for answers. Using this solution is like plugging a super charger into your data warehouse, allowing you to load about 1TB of data into the appliance in only a hour. DB2 z/OS takes care of the rest through its optimizer technology, routing the queries to IDAA when the new appliance will produce faster results.

Meeting and talking to all the architects about the technology was really great also. They explained in-depth how the DB2 z/OS IDAA Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are used for data decompression, data filtering and early SQL projections and restriction. The IBM proprietary technology is great but the appliance speed of implementation and analytic speed of use are also impressive. So make sure to get one of these new DB2 z/OS IDAA accelerators before your competition buys the appliance. Also make sure to mention my name to your IBM sales rep, because I want one of these new products for myself because this new technology is a game changer for traditional data warehouse databases. This new appliance makes “speed of thought data warehousing” a reality with DB2 z/OS IDAA.

I will be speaking at the Heart of America DB2 Users Group on March 12 in Overland Kansas. (http://sites.google.com/site/hoadb2ug/announcements/march2012meeting).

I will be doing my new speech: Agile Big Data Analytics: Implementing a 22 Billion Row Data Warehouse

This presentation discusses the design, architecture, meta-data, performance and other experiences of building a big data and analytics data warehouse system. You will learn through this presentation the real life issues, agile development considerations, and solutions for building a data warehouse of 22+ billion rows in only six months.

This presentation will help you understand techniques to manage, design and leverage the big data issues for a more in-depth understanding of your business. Also the agile development processes will be detailed, showing how to uncovered complex analytics requirements and other issues early in the development cycle. This presentation will help you understand all these experiences that took processes from 37 hours to seconds so you can create a successful big data design and scalable data warehouse analytic architecture.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

First, according to Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, Third Industrial Revolution, the world is changing. In the book and in this shorter Forbes article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/terrywaghorn/2011/12/12/jeremy-rifkins-third-industrial-revolution/) Rifkin talks about the latest trends in the IT world are infiltrating the energy infrastructure world. In his book he describes how the IT and energy world is changing from a centralized silo world to more of a distributed, collaborative, and horizontal world. Talking about energy and five pillars of the new distributed model for generating, distributing, storing, sharing and integrating energy, he compares the change to the evolution of information systems and all types of data due to the influence of the internet.

Many companies have not been able to make their z/OS and DB2 systems leverage these distributed, collaborative and horizontal architectures. The companies that are struggling with z/OS thought too late about hooking z/OS to the web, horizontal performance of data sharing, using z/OS to set up and host 100s of Linux VM workloads. Or they simply don’t realize that z/OS now runs the Windows operating system. Distributing z/OS computing power is easier than it has ever been. Data sharing, reliability, scalability and availability of all types of large and small systems allow everyone to collaborate, distribute and integrate data.

Next, the top CIO trends for 2012 shows that everyone will be focusing on business intelligence and analytics, mobile computing and cloud computing in the next year. (http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240114141/Gartner-CIO-spending-2012) These trends align nicely with Jeremy Rifkin’s observations about distributed, collaborative and horizontal systems trends since both ideas focus on measurement, efficiency and capturing distributed input sources. These trends further extend to all the core issues IT wrestles with every day: all types of disparate devices producing more data faster that has to be analyzed rapidly to discover its value.

These trends have always been happening. Now, it’s just happening faster. The companies that survive will be the ones that hook their systems up to every type of device, can structure and develop relationships within its data to provide meaningful measurements of Big Data’s value. Google’s main ad revenue dropped last quarter and the stock lost $50 in one day. Maybe their big distributed systems can’t analyze, compare it and measure it all fast enough.

Finally, developing and implementing large application and especially big systems is difficult. According to a 2010 Dr. Dobbs survey (http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/226500046) the rates of failure for all types of development continue to be very high. The failure rate continues to drive project budget and probably causes the platform to take the blame.

Even though it wasn’t the platform’s fault, the mainframe people were the last to embrace new development techniques like Agile methodologies. This delay in trying new methodologies, combined with all the college graduates not knowing the z/OS platform didn’t help. So probably not knowing how to make a system work on z/OS and only wanting UNIX or Windows systems helped replace those big systems. My last several consulting assignments have been with Agile and SCRUM projects. One project recently was a brand new 22 billion row data warehouse designed and implemented in only 6 months. Agile, SCRUM and other project development methods are now embraced and it is definitely helping the success rate of all types of projects especially DB2 and z/OS projects.

So why is it more difficult in Europe and especially in Italy for DB2 and z/OS? It is probably because everyone already rebels against centralization rule either from the church or the family. Does the culture rebel against an old controlling centralized z/OS computing model also?

Every way you look at it, z/OS and DB2 are great solutions for a growing number of companies because of their scalability, reliability performance and ability to distribute all types of cloud z/OS, UNIX or Windows computing resources.

Based on the trends reported by Rifkin and CIO magazine, as well as the emergence of Agile-type methodologies in the z/OS and DB2 world, expect to see more distributed systems using z/OS and DB2 as the hub and driver of distributed systems that require intense Big Data analysis. Who knows? The experience might emigrate to Italy!

I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/

First the z/OS platform continues to expand its functionality, compatibility and interfaces. Some companies think of the z/OS platform as that old mainframe that isn’t doing too much anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth for most companies. Turn off the z/OS applications and most likely the business world would not function. The z/OS platform reliability, availability, and scalability achieve business objectives while other system solutions provide creative technology and marketing to mimic these proven capabilities.

The new z/OS system is not only hosting z/OS applications that run and have been enhanced for the last 20 years, the z/OS platform is the server for UNIX, Linux and even Windows applications discussed in this eWeek article (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IBM-Brings-Windows-to-the-Mainframe-298629/). People or companies that think of z/OS only as a mainframe are stuck in the past and need to educate themselves on the z/OS capabilities. Many companies are seeing huge cost savings by not only converting to DB2 but consolidating UNIX and Windows workloads to z/OS platform. It is 2012 and what platform has the fastest CPUs and runs at the lowest power consumption? The z/OS mainframe. So get educated and go green.

Next when I started DB2 work way back when I was 10 years old I was coming from developing, administering and managing IDMS systems. I was fresh into IT and thought the risk was worth the reward going from IDMS to DB2. Careers, like a company’s applications are huge investments, and DB2 databases prove the ability to implement an application and have that data available for many additional types of business functions or application types. Try to share distributed systems and your efforts will be thwarted by connectivity, reliability, availability and scalability issues.

IBM learned its lesson when all the IMS systems converted to IDMS because of its new technology and ease of use. IBM is not going to let that happen again with DB2 as it has proven over the last 20 years with constant aggressive innovation. Through the enhancements over the years the DB2 family, z/OS and LUW have embraced all types of unstructured data, XML, audio and video etc. There truly isn’t anything you can’t put into a DB2 database. DB2’s interfaces to SQL, XML, and all the types of programming languages provide connectivity to expand your application to everywhere.

You won’t have to worry about it going out of date because its architecture provides for constant improvement. With the new IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) the z/OS platform embraces several new technology trends. The new IDAA technology (more information at (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/analytics-accelerator/) provides extremely fast analytic capabilities that every company will soon be using to provide company metrics. Also within IDAA, DB2 is continuing to embrace new Columnar database designs, data gating and extreme compression technologies. DB2, with its embrace and extend tradition of leveraging new technologies, is a great place to put your database investments.

DB2 for z/OS and DB2 10 provide a tremendous value proposition. IBM continues to improve its pricing model for the platform by enabling more free zIIP CPU power for all types of distributed and Java applications. IBM continues this trend as more web, UNIX and distributed applications are leveraging existing databases and developing new ones.

Finally, DB2 10 provides great value as it improves its ability to share existing applications with DB2 10 handling five to ten times more concurrent users–up to 20,000 users. DB2 10’s enhancements such as faster optimized processing, leverage of new devices such as solid-state disk, in-memory workfile enhancements, index insert parallelism improvements and better SQL/XML access paths, provides many reductions in CPU costs for existing and new workloads. DB2 10 with its easier administration schema change processes for database maintenance, more concurrent and cheaper utilities, and availability features that are the envy of other DBMSs show IBM is addressing your company’s and the industry’s challenges.

Other platforms and DBMSs may be the favorite for a season, but DB2 10 and the z/OS platform are components that your company can bet its business on for years of innovations, continued cost reduction and performance improvements.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/

First, DB2 10 requires System Managed Storage (SMS) for the DB2 Catalog. If your shop has just adopted SMS for DB2, make sure to set up special SMS groups for your DB2 Catalog, and its high performance requirements. Having good SMS I/O performance for your DB2 10 Catalog, its logging infrastructure and especially its DB2 10 DSNDB07 area are critical to your overall system and application performance. Make sure these DB2 SMS groups can perform at a high I/O rate before your DB2 migration to Version 10.

Next, before starting your DB2 migration, identify and fix all DB2 applications and SQL causing any RID Pool failures. RID Pool failures are going to become an extra burden in DB2 10 as they will overflow into your DSNDB07 sort and temporary table pool instead of converting to a table space scan. Diagnose the number of RID Pool failures and how much they will impact your DSNDB07 area. Then expand the DSNDB07 storage appropriately. Your DB2 10 migration will be judged by the application performance after DB2 10 starts up and RID Pool failure is an application problem that can make your DB2 migration to Version 10 hard work look bad.

Next, document your DB2 subsystem address spaces’ memory usage. DB2 10 has a number of great features and many of them come at a cost of additional memory. Unfortunately, this DB2 10 memory usage comes from the core and some additional memory usage under the 2GB bar. Examine your DB2 Version 9 before the DB2 migration and see how much memory space is free and available. Also, make sure that your DB2 monitoring is in place to document any SOS (Short on Storage) situations before and after your DB2 migration to Version 10. These DB2 SOS situations are tremendously bad for every aspect of your DB2 system and application performance. So make sure your system has enough memory.

As I help clients with their pre-migration preparations and performance tuning it is always important to make sure things are working well before the migration. Examine these three DB2 Version 9 system areas and it will definitely help your performance after your DB2 migration to DB2 10.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

I look forward to speaking at the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference 2012 North America conference. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado on May 14-18, 2012. Sign up today at www.idug.org.

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/

First, the developers and the DBAs I have talked to have been extremely busy doing all sorts of maintenance and creation of new DB2 objects. Management needs business analytics on the number of new or changed database objects such as table spaces, tables and indexes. How many more database objects is your staff managing at the end of 2011 compared to last year? Or how many more entire systems or data sharing members exist compared to last year? Also, how many more reorganizations, resizings, or maintenance jobs were supported, how many off-hours or on-call situations did your staff support? Do some research and supply the business analytics of how often your staff gets harassed and ask your boss if you can call him that often.

Next, the year has also been stressful improving the security and compliance area. When I have been doing DB2 system security reviews this year, I found more overall objects that support more data assets and need more attention. The security configuration reviews of system settings shows many more public, SSL or Trusted settings. The number of security ROLE definitions by application, department, or division and the number of encrypted, masked or special authorities within the system, database and applications continue to grow. The number of combinations of ROLEs and their column or row level access combinations will definitely stagger management minds. Get the business analytics of the numbers of new security configurations defined or improved in 2011. Your management compliance and security departments will definitely appreciate reporting this up their chain of command to the board of directors.

Last, but not least, the business analytics of the simple number of system and application end users processing work needs to be communicated to management. Even in these tough economic times businesses are adding user workload and business executives need to understand how business critical the systems you and your group support are. Management knows your systems are important, but documenting the business analytics of the number of users and other previously mentioned areas in a report to management reinforces how important data asset management is within your company.

Business analytics reports are the best way to show these areas and it’s a great way to prove why your application development, DBA and security areas are so overworked, tired and need more education, consultant help and tools. Do some research and supply the business analytics of all these situations mentioned. Assign one hour or more time to each of these incidents or situation and put these business analytics into management’s year-end salary review process. It will definitely help your budget discussions and overall negotiating position.

Happy Holidays and have a Happy New Year.

Also, I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

Early bird reduced pricing for these seminars ends January 9th. Sign up now!

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/

First, his company’s new commitment to DB2 z/OS is moving forward very quickly. The systems people are in the advanced stages of implementing DB2 10. The reason they are ahead of the pack now is because several failed attempts to migrate and implement their applications on that “other” database combined with business analytics, caused management to finally decide to stick with DB2 z/OS and the mainframe. Based on business analytics, it seems the “other” platform and database could not match the reliability, scalability and performance of DB2 z/OS. During this challenging time, the z/OS system wasn’t upgraded often. In the last year the systems people have gone from Version 7, to Version 8 and are now ready to go to DB2 10. My friend noted that z/OS is no longer called the mainframe, just the central big server.

Next, the turmoil of the project caused many of his friends and fellow employees to lose faith and leave the company. The young CIO didn’t get his big payday from the “synergies created by the new environment,” but did get wined and dined by all the vendors who sold his company products and tools. The company’s IT budget ballooned during the “migration” project, but is now reduced by returning to the central big server platform and jettisoning all the extra contracts. Consolidating UNIX environments, merging the “other” database into DB2 and moving SQL Server systems to the z/OS platform provide real performance advantages according to business analytics. The DB2 z/OS environment also can handle recoveries of the database to a point in time; something the SQL Server environment configuration and backups were having difficulty handling. Also having everything on one platform allows all the applications to share data.

My friend said that all these issues came to light as the business reviewed the business analytics of the performance of these attempts to get off the mainframe. By publishing the performance figures of the DB2 z/OS online transactions per day, the number of SQL statements completed and the number of jobs processed daily, management was able to understand through business analytics that as the number of transaction on the mainframe increased so did their business profitability. The core business processes ran on DB2 z/OS and the analysis of the numbers proved that getting additional features and functions into the core applications was the key for business growth. Management mistakenly thought migrating to the other platform would provide growth, but according to business analytics it is always new products, better customer service and product flexibility that increase business profitability. The business analytics of the environment were the key factor for management to understand the value within the DB2 z/OS platform.

The lesson? Get the business analytics going within your DB2 environment regardless whether its DB2 z/OS or DB2 LUW. A report showing the number of transactions, SQL executed and the programs per day are great statistics to start to send up to management. My buddy has three years of data and it shows how the workload on the DB2 z/OS environment continues to grow along with his company, making management eager to go to DB2 10. The transaction reports and analytics just might help your company avoid chasing the latest magazine trend, so get your reports and business analytics together as soon as possible.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/

These presentations talked about how everyone is using business analytics to make their business more profitable. One of the presentations that I saw talked about the analytics during the keynote session. They quoted results from Creating Business Value with Analytics by David Kiron and Rebecca Shockley from MIT that was finished this September 15^th. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2011-fall/53112/creating-business-value-with-analytics

Another paper quoted was Analytics: The Widening Divide by MIT Sloan and IBM Research http://sloanreview.mit.edu/feature/achieving-competitive-advantage-through-analytics/. These reports talked about how corporations are using business analytics to create competitive advantages in their industries.

Analytics: The Widening Divide documented that 58% of organizations surveyed now use analytics to create a competitive advantage within the market. That statistic is up from 37% one year ago. A survey of over 4500 executives in 120 countries provided this data. One of the things that they found within the survey was that there were three main key competencies for adopting a business analytics environment: information management, analytic skills and tools and a data-oriented corporate culture.

These three competencies, information management, analytical skills and tools and a data-oriented culture, were vital for the adoption and use of analytics within these corporations.

It was interesting for the study to find in the survey that there were three types of corporations adopting these kinds of technologies within their corporate culture. The three types of analytical corporations were aspirational, experienced, and transformed.

First, the aspirational corporation is just starting out with business analytics and primarily using spreadsheets for their ad hoc analysis. The aspirational corporation is new to business analytics and the use of spreadsheets throughout their corporation assists them to execute day-to-day activities.

Next, the experienced business analytics corporation is beginning with a set portfolio of analytical tools. The analytics tools are used to work with in-line business units for developing metrics for their business unit processes. They use a growing focus on the business performance numbers providing cross training and hiring skills externally that will help them in their business analytics efforts. These experienced users have leadership and topline support of their business analytics processes. The experienced users made up 45% of the overall survey results.

The third group was the transformed corporations. This group is a group of strong and sophisticated users using enterprise data models to create integrated views of the business with a growing focus on unstructured data. The transformed corporations have a strong topline mandate to use business analytics within their business units and corporations. This develops and reinforces a corporate culture to support business analytics and opens the business to these new methodologies and skills. By using day to day business analytics to make operational and future strategies across the organization, these transformed corporations were much more profitable than the other types of corporations using business analytics: the experienced or the aspirational corporations.

As was quoted in the paper, “In a $112 billion company, Mckesson noted that even a 99.9 degree of accuracy can lead to the loss of more than $100 million.” By using analytics these transformed corporations are taking their business to the next level and saving huge amounts of money. So plan your 2012 data warehousing, performance activities to support the continued improvement and support of the core business of analytics and help your corporation save millions of dollars, too.

Finally, I am going to be presenting at the Midwest DB2 Users groups in the 4^th quarter. I will be doing Minneapolis on December 6; Milwaukee, Wisconsin (http://www.wdug.com/) on December 7; and Chicago, Illinois (http://www.mwdug.org/) on December 8. I look forward to seeing everyone at the meetings to discuss all their plans for the 2012 year.

Come see me in any of these venues and ask me your DB2 performance or data warehouse performance questions.

Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at dave@davebeulke.com if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.

Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.

Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24

February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen

February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke

February 24: Two great seminars to choose from

Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen

or

DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke

http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/