The trip to Prague, CZ last week for the International DB2 Users Group meeting was fabulous.  The city certainly has changed since I’ve been there – all for the better.  It seems more cosmopolitan, the people seem younger, more vibrant than I remember from 2004.  And the dining and music – Kim and I attended jazz and classical music concerts and enjoyed Madame Butterfly at the Prague State Opera – were amazing CutterWelderMaestro.

Here’s my pitch on “IBM Data Retrieval Technologies” if you weren’t able to attend.  IDUG EMEA 2014 E7 – IBM Data Retrieval Technologies – RDBMS BLU IBM Netezza and Hadoop

Next year IDUG EMEA will be in Dublin.  Hope you can join us for a Guinness by the River Liffey.

When IBM acquired Netezza the phenomenal processing capability enabled by the Netezza FPGA technology (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) made Netezza’s query speeds clear winners when benchmarked against all competitors.  Today IBM announced a new generation of Netezza, now branded the “IBM PureData System for Analytics”Powered by Netezza”, the N2001 systems.

The new N2001 system specs once again put Netezza into the “catch-me-if-you-can category, with a 3 times faster scan rate than the current Netezza, while supporting 50% greater storage capacity per rack, and improved resiliency and fault tolerance, thanks to more spare drives in the cabinet and faster drive regeneration.

The N2001 is available with the same quick, simple installation, and IBM also updated the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator, the “sidecar” Netezza that attaches to the mainframe.  More on the new sidecar soon – I hear the IDAA has even more capabilities to offer DB2 for z customers.  Stay tuned!