Frank Fillmore will be delivering a session on IDAA use cases at the IBM Insight Conference in Las Vegas (formerly IOD) on Tuesday, October 28th, from 10am-11am.

The IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) speeds analytic queries that currently run on DB2 for z/OS.

IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator can:

• Help with operational data store reconsolidation on IBM System z.
• Reduce extract, transform and load (ETL) costs and latency to make OLTP data available for analysis faster and less expensively.
• Speed up batch reporting and offload System z processor consumption.
• Archive original data by using the high performance storage saver (HPSS).
• Enable analysis of VSAM and Information Management System (IMS) data along with DB2 for z/OS by using the DB2 Analytics Accelerator Loader.

In Frank’s session, attendees will learn about these functions and more, and gain an understanding of possible, interesting, and valuable IDAA use cases.

I hope we will see you there!

We were so pleased with the response to the *free* hands-on IDAA class delivered in Baltimore in April that we’ve decided to do two more in June!  Back again, to repeat their successful presentations will be Frank Fillmore and IBM IDAA experts Saghi Amirsoleymani and Mike Hood.

Class is open to any current DB2 for z/OS customer considering an IDAA acquisition, and will provide attendees with the opportunity to test drive an IDAA.

IBM® DB2® Analytics Accelerator for z/OS is a high-performance appliance that integrates IBM Netezza and zEnterprise technologies. The solution delivers extremely fast results for complex and data-intensive DB2 queries on data warehousing, business intelligence and analytic workloads.

IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS helps you:

• Query data at high speeds—to significantly improve response times for unpredictable, complex and long-running query workloads.
• Extend the capabilities of DB2 for z/OS—to support a cost-effective analytics solution for data warehousing, business intelligence and predictive analytics.
• Lower operating costs—by reducing System z disk requirements and offloading workloads and archiving infrequently used data using the High Performance Storage Saver (HPSS) technology.

DB2 Gold Consultant Frank Fillmore will present these 2-day, hands-on training classes to introduce experienced DB2 for z/OS DBA’s to the IDAA.  Starting with an overview of the unique hybrid technology behind the IDAA, and covering topics including installation, security, and operational management, the classes will deliver an understanding of how the IDAA can quickly integrate into your existing zEnterprise infrastructure and rapidly provide value.  Frank will be joined by IBM’s Saghi Amirsoleymani and Mike Hood for sessions focused on the IDAA tools.

There is no charge for these classes, however attendees are responsible for their own travel and lodging.  Please note that due to the technical nature of the hands-on labs, there is no distance learning/remote option available for these classes.

A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided each day.

Dates and locations scheduled are below.  Click on either session to register.  We hope you will join us!

IDAA Hands On Training NYC June 11 and 12 Terrace Club

IDAA Hands On Training Columbus June 25 and 26

The IDAA class feedback was terrific as the attendees had the opportunity to expand their understanding of the potential use cases and opportunities to use the IDAA to:  1) speed analytic queries, 2) archive rarely used data, and retrieve it quickly, and 3) reconsolidate workloads on System z.

We hosted the class in Baltimore, since it’s our backyard.  At the recommendation of the IBM Big Data team, we are planning to host two more sessions in June.  The dates are confirmed:  June 11th and 12th, and June 25th and 26th, but the locations are still TBD.

If you are interested in attending, the outline is available here, and my email address is here.  If you let me know you are interested I will contact you – before the end of April – with the two locations.

IBM will host the first zEnterprise Summit for 2014 at the Marriott in Washington, DC on January 21st (next Tuesday!)  I encourage you to attend f you are in the area and your schedule allows.  Your biggest challenge will be figuring out which of the many sessions to attend.  The announcement information is below; the complete agenda and registration are on the IBM website here.  I hope to see you there.

Abstract:

New technology is stretching IT budgets in many directions, forcing IT to find better ways of meeting business demands in increasingly complex data centers. With enterprise technology from IBM, you can continue to advance and close the gaps between where you are and where you want to be.

Attend the IBM zEnterprise Technology Summit and you’ll come away with plenty of valuable information that will help you continue your own trek to the summit.   We’ll show you how the unique capabilities of zEnterprise solutions fit into an enterprise private cloud, how integrated analytics can support better decision-making and new choices for delivering services faster and with more flexibility. Read More…

Fall is the busiest time of year with IOD requiring so much *energy*!  Now that Thanksgiving has passed and it’s December already, it’s time for me to focus on what’s happening here locally.  Which means, of course, the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group meeting, scheduled for December 11th, from 9:00am – 3:30pm, at the Columbia Sheraton.

This year’s December meeting is sponsored by SEGUS.  Next year’s meeting (plug, plug) will be hosted by The Fillmore Group.

This month’s agenda includes a kickoff session to be delivered by DB2 Gold Consultant, IBM Champion and President of the Atlanta DB2 Users Group, Ted Alexander.  We’ve worked with Ted in the past and have long admired his technical expertise and his charm (of course!)  Ted’s presentation will run from 9:00am – 10:15am.  Ted’s session abstract is below.  If you would like to join us, the complete agenda and registration information are here.

Application Developers & DB2 for z/OS

Things are changing with every release of DB2 for z/OS. More features for application developers to exploit, and a few that are going away. In this session we will cover DB2 for z/OS version 9 and DB2 for z/OS version 10 and some new stuff on DB2 for z/OS version 11.

This presentation is geared toward the application developer and the tricks that can make their application run smoothly and upgrade easier to the next release of DB2. Did you ever wonder how DB2 for z/OS new features are chosen?  We’ll have a look at that, too.

We live in a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) happy world, and there’s one very special TLA that very few IBM customers – and even IBM’ers – are aware of – VAP.  We have a VAP that we are very proud of and today received notification from IBM that it was recently revalidated.  I thought I should write about it, because VAP really is the best way for customers to buy IBM solutions.  Even if the VAP you need isn’t one we offer, ask your IBM team or Business Partner if they offer a VAP for the solution you are considering.

VAP stands for Value Advantage Plus.  Not exactly clear, huh?  Well, basically what a VAP does is offers IBM Business Partners a discount on IBM software solutions when they bundle services and training.   This does two things:  1) it offers an incentive to Business Partners to include services and training in a solution proposal, and 2) it reduces the cost of software to the partner.

Most technical solutions require technical assistance to implement; anyone who has been given a redbook and told to figure it out knows how difficult a do-it-yourself implementation is, and we have all unfortunately become accustomed to the software license cost being the only cost discussed when purchasing IBM software.  The second benefit, reduced cost to the Business Partner should, if you are working with an honest and ethical partner (think The Fillmore Group!) result in a lower price for you, the customer.

The Fillmore Group’s VAP is for IBM replication solutions, including Q Replication and ICDC.  We are currently working on both Q Replication and ICDC implementation projects and have historically been the exclusive provider of public IBM education for these products.

If you are considering a replication solution purchase and implementation please let us know – we would be happy to help you take advantage of this little known (terrific!) way to make sure your solution project is a success.

If you are in the Baltimore/Washington area tomorrow afternoon, please stop by the BW DB2 Users Group Meeting at the Columbia Sheraton to hear Robert Catterall present on:

“DB2 for z/OS Stored Procedures – Trends and Technology” and 

“The MOST VALUABLE Information I Get From DB2 for z/OS Monitor Accounting and Statistics Reports”

Robert is a terrific speaker (and a great consultant, too!)  For the meeting address and logistics visit the BWDB2UG website at www.BWDB2UG.org

IBM DB2 Connect expert Melanie Stopfer’s Presentation, “Help Me, Help You – DRDA Connections to DB2 for z/OS” will be delivered to the DB2 Connect Virtual Users Group on Tuesday, April 27th, from 12:00pm-1:00pm EDT.  All are welcome to join us for this webinar.  Register here.

Abstract:
Do you want to better understand and tune your remote DRDA connections to DB2 z/OS? Are you looking for tips to make your life easier?  Melanie will present analogies and insider advice to help improve performance, availability, reliability, and usability. The goal is to provide you with an arsenal of tips you can use in various remote DRDA distributed to DB2 z/OS situations.  Come learn new DB2 Connect and JDBC Universal Driver tips and tricks that you need to know.

Read More…

I attended IBM’s zEnterprise announcement in New York yesterday.  IBM Senior VP Steve Mills said it was the most important announcement IBM had ever made in its impact on saving customers money.  He also said IBM spent US$1.5 billion dollars on the zEnterprise research and development effort over the past several years.  So, as movie reviewers ask about the latest blockbuster: “Can you see the money up on the screen?”.  The answer comes in a few loosely coupled parts.

1. Oskar Schindler said you must have a “clever accountant”.  Mills made it clear that organizations that can accurately allocate their IT expenses will see the most benefit from zEnterprise.  zEnterprise delivers System z quality of services (QOS) across heterogeneous architectures: the aforementioned System z as well as Power 7 blade servers and (eventually) System x blades.  The problem for most organizations is that System z “mainframe” costs have been capitalized from central IT budgets for over four decades.  As the PC revolution unfolded since the early 1980’s, most of the costs for networking, systems administrator salaries, PCs themselves and the software they run have been expensed out of departmental budgets.  Organizations with the discipline to accurately accumulate these costs certainly will be able to see the benefit of deploying the zEnterprise platform.  Interestingly, the table talk at lunch indicated that some IBMers see the sweet-spot for zEnterprise in the rapidly growing economies of China and Russia.  The reason?  Tight budgetary control and hierarchical, centralized decision-making in state and quasi-state enterprises (think Gazprom) will help them “get it” immediately.  I would not be surprised to see zEnterprise adoption in emerging and growing economies exceed that of North America in the next two years.
2. IBM has been able to run Linux on System z hardware using Virtual Servers and z/VM for a decade.  And the System z has been able to dispatch workloads to specialty engines within System z such as the Integrated Facility for Linux, zIIP, and zAAP for years.  Think of zEnterprise as extending that dispatching capability out of the physical System z box to discrete blade servers.  IBM’s goal is to move away from the “you can do everything on System z” posture – which in reality was a losing, rear-guard action – to embracing disparate architectures and acknowledging that maybe a print server really should run under Linux on an x86 platform.  Yet you can benefit from the centralized management and security of the System z.  This is workload integration at the chip, firmware, hypervisor, and middleware levels.  A pretty neat trick.
3. So what can I do with the zEnterprise?  Here are two relatively simple scenarios.

The Online Travel Portal  One well-known travel reservation site front-ends their expensive Oracle transaction servers with MySQL running on cheap x86 hardware.  While you’re noodling around trying to figure out the best intinerary, all you’re seeing is data replicated from Oracle to MySQL on a near-real-time basis.  When you enter your credit card number and hit “Purchase”, you’re routed to the Oracle OLTP server.  This is called “database tiering”.  I can now architect the same topology on System z with DB2 for z/OS on the back-end and x86 blades running the DB2 Express-C freeware database.  On the zEnterprise platform, these databases will communicate over a 10Gb private, secure network with extraordinarily low latency.  Ever get the “That seat is no longer available” message?  It might be a thing of the past with zEnterprise.

The Hospitality Company  This organization runs their centralized reservation systems on DB2 for z/OS already.  In order to support their frequent-guest affinity program portal, they have WebSphere Application Server running on a separate System p AIX server.  The only problem is that sometimes transactions hang to the point that the JVMs have to be recycled.  The Java programmers say their code is tightly written and the DB2 for z/OS database administrations say that the incoming SQL requests are satisfied sub-second.  While zEnterprise alone would not resolve this problem – see pureQuery and the lyrically named Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition – the application and the database servers will be as tightly coupled as possible while each runs on the optimal platform.  Since the transfer points and the servers themselves are under unified management, an entire layer of complexity (and potential breakage) will be eliminated.

The real buzz in the announcement for me is the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer (ISAO).  For a generation as a DB2 database administrator, I’ve told my clients that OLTP and ad hoc query workloads should not be intermingled.  The solution has been to make copies of the data using replication technologies – InfoSphere Change Data Capture and Q Replication among them.  This approach has been a boon to DBAs, and software, storage, and server salesmen everywhere.  When it achieves its full promise, ISAO will evaluate incoming database requests and dispatch them along with the data needed to satisfy the request to the appropriate platform server.  DB2 for z/OS will serve as a centralized front-end for all workloads: OLTP, OLAP, ad hoc query, etc.  ISAO will transparently run the workload on the optimal platform and return the result set to the requesting application.  Organizations will be able to dismantle the miasma of extracts, FTPs, and other artifices now necessary to keep analytic workloads from bogging down OLTP.  And they’ll reduce complexity.  And save a ton of cash.

So on whose door will IBM knock first?  Clearly the System z installed base will be getting lots of attention.  But could Facebook or some other enterprise with orders-of-magnitude scaling issues (500 million Facebook users and counting) benefit from zEnterprise?  Surprisingly, the answer is Yes!  Facebook needs to manage lots of unstructured data (pictures, videos, et al) , but they also have the need for complex analytics.  First, to target online advertising ever more precisely, but also to serve larger societal needs.  Let’s say a man declares he needs a reduction in child support because he’s nearly broke.  The local social services agency unleases a smart agent to run against social networking sites and comes up with pictures on Facebook from the man’s recent two-week vacation in Hawaii.  Too big brother-ish?  A topic for another day.

IBM has moved DB2 Connect support into the Optim group, as it is in some ways the original Optim solution.  Kathy Zeidenstein, who manages community outreach efforts for the Optim team (a weekly e-newsletter, content on the developerworks site, Twitter, etc.) is coordinating a DB2 Connect Virtual Briefing scheduled for August 19th.  The primary purpose of the presentation is to introduce new features in the advanced edition, however, as DB2 Connect can be used in so many ways, and is so often under-utilized, she’s invited Frank to devote some of the time allocated to delivering an overview of what DB2 Connect can do.  More information is on the way…for the moment we have the date and time reserved (mark your calendars – August 19th at 1pm Eastern), and a tentative agenda:

DB2 Connect for DBAs:  A Primer and a Look to the Future

Whether you are a DB2 for LUW DBA who would like to access enterprise information or a z/OS DBA wondering how all those Java and .NET programmers are getting to your data, DB2 Connect is the solution.  Frank Fillmore, A DB2 Gold Consultant with an extensive history in training and consulting, will step you through a DB2 Connect primer from end-to-end, including platform architecture, DB2 Connect configuration parameters, and more.  Case studies from large scale DB2 Connect health checks will be included. Kevin Foster, who manages the development of the product will be on hand to discuss packaging including licensing, new packaging options such as the DB2 Connect Advanced Edition, which provides pureQuery acceleration in the box, and upcoming changes to the product.
What you will learn:
• Why you need DB2 Connect
• How DB2 Connect is packaged and licensed
• Platform architecture
• Configuration and tuning options

As soon as I have registration information I will post it.