IBM Improves DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse Software

IBM is addressing the challenge of today’s business leaders to deliver greater return on their IT investments with new versions of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software. Code-named Cobra, the new version of DB2 reduces an even greater amount of space needed to store data, helping clients save up to 75% on related costs including energy – more than any other available database software. This offering is also the industry’s first database software that will deliver business analytics capabilities for both relational and XML data at the same time.

For example: UCLA Medical Center is using this technology to keep all patient records online while reducing storage space needed to manage these records by 50%. In addition, UCLA is currently developing three clinical applications using the new DB2 features that allow it to analyze and better understand patterns and trends among patients with similar symptoms or illnesses, to help determine how to better serve their patient community.

The software also includes workload management and autonomic computing features that improve the performance of high priority applications such as closing quarterly financial reports and helping IT staff more efficiently manage their growing data, leading to a time savings of up to 35% on administrative tasks.

As the information generated by companies continues to grow exponentially, there is a huge burden placed on database infrastructure, with a corresponding increase in costs to manage, power, cool and house more data. According to IBM, 15 petabytes of new information are being generated each day.

Innovations in IBM’s database software will help clients combat these issues by better utilizing hardware, improving administration efficiency, easily running applications written from other database software, and generating new intelligence from valuable XML data.

"Industries such as banking, health care and retail are grappling with the increasing costs of energy while managing, analyzing and accessing information to achieve better business results," said Arvind Krishna, vice president, IBM Information Management Development. "With the new innovations in DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, IBM is again delivering clients and partners higher performance and lower energy."

Several clients are already benefiting from this new technology. For example: Douglas Holding AG, the German-based specialty retailer of perfumes and fashion accessories uses DB2 to manage the sales records for its 1,800 European shops. The retailer uses an XML application as a bridge between store cash registers and its data warehouse. In testing the new version of DB2 with the application, the retailer is already seeing improved accuracy of sales records giving them a greater visibility into customer buying habits, helping them improve overall business performance.

Additionally, BJC Healthcare, based in St. Louis, Missouri, is using DB2 to help the organization and its medical school make the transition from gathering data for medical research manually to electronically. Using DB2, the time needed to gather this information has been reduced from months to just hours or minutes. BJC Healthcare is now able to run complex queries over massive amounts of data, analyze it and provide researchers timely access to patients’ detailed medical records. With this data, it can identify patients that meet the criteria for clinical studies and adjust their courses of treatment as needed.

InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 Enterprise Edition, powered by DB2 9.7, also includes tools to simplify data analysis and data mining, as well as a new Departmental Edition of the software, targeted for smaller organizations and departments within a larger organization. This new edition meets the needs of these organizations, allowing them to transform their company’s data into reliable and consistent business intelligence.

IBM’s Integrated Data Management approach helps improve developer productivity – an essential way for companies to reduce costs. DB2 9.7 includes new technology that makes it easier for IT professionals to quickly develop and deploy applications, including ones written specifically to operate on other database software. Now, developers can easily take advantage of these new technologies using the IBM Data Studio to design, develop, deploy and manage information throughout its entire life cycle.

Companies that have participated in IBM’s Early Access Program have noted significant time savings when deploying applications to the new version of DB2. "To move a non-DB2 application to a previous version of DB2 would have taken an estimated two-year effort. We were thrilled to see it took only one week to move it to the new version of DB2. This represents a terrific opportunity to expand our international community of users, partners and developers. We’re very excited to partner with IBM to make new deployment options available," said Paolo Juvara, CTO of Openbravo, a Web-based Solution ERP provider and IBM business partner.

EnterpriseDB, another IBM business partner, was a contributor to enhancements in DB2 9.7. "We are very pleased to collaborate with IBM to enhance and extend our database technology," said Ed Boyajian, chief executive officer, EnterpriseDB. "We are committed to making exciting changes happen in the evolving database software market."

DB2 9.7 and InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 will be available in June.
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