IBM’s flagship enterprise relational database Db2 has just been added to AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). Db2 joins commercial vendor relational database implementations Oracle and MS SQL Server along with open source databases MySQL, MariaDB, and PostreSQL as a fully-managed AWS offering.
Why this matters:
- Deployment I’m currently working with a large commercial vehicle manufacturer. Over two weeks ago I requested that a small Db2 database be deployed for query optimization. The clock is still ticking and the database still isn’t available. With RDS Db2 can be deployed and configured in minutes.
- Horizontal scaling Many of The Fillmore Group’s clients across several different industries have significant variability of demand – days of the week, times of the month, and seasonal variations. For large retailers purchasing ramps up in the summer, staffing in the early fall, sales in late fall and early winter, and returns in January. Managing on-prem capacity in such an environment usually means expensive compute and memory is underutilized for several months in the spring and summer. RDS provides on-demand scale up and scale down.
- Vertical scaling A large industrial client provisioned Db2 to store sensor data that will be analyzed for anomalies. Within six months one such database was at 85 Tb and continues to grow. Capacity growth is both predictable and linear, but even metronomically adding compute, memory, and storage is both budget and labor intensive.
Two more things to consider:
- IBM invented the relational database. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks was published by Edgar F. Codd, IBM Research, in 1970 in the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Trillions of dollars of value has been realized by organizations which have deployed IBM Db2 or other relational database variants since they became available in the 1980s.
- Many enterprises have successfully migrated workloads from other-vendor relational database implementations. Here’s just one example: SmarterQuestions White Paper – Oracle to DB2 Migration Lessons Learned – Final