Thanks to my colleague, Kim May, for another wonderful job leading customers and IBMers through the rewards and challenges of converting Oracle databases to DB2. The recording of the latest webinar is found here.  The presentation materials: Oracle Customers Consider DB2 5.16.17

Finally, The Fillmore Group’s White Paper on Oracle to DB2 migrations: SmarterQuestions White Paper – Oracle to DB2 Migration Lessons Learned – Final

Please reach out to Kim or me if you have any questions.

The Fillmore Group will deliver a free webinar Wednesday, June 26th, from 11am-noon EDT on the value of migrating from Oracle to DB2.  We have been assisting customers with Oracle to DB2 migrations for the past few years and believe that with the recent DB2 BLU enhancements and IULA announcement the time is right to break free!

Register Here.

What’s an IULA?  It’s the IBM Unlimited License Agreement, a new way to license DB2 use that provides a low cost entry point to purchase DB2, and allows customers to predict and control their ongoing maintenance and support costs.  

As long-time believers in the superiority of IBM’s database technology, we also want to spread the word about the technical enhancements announced for the new IBM BLU Acceleration.  With beta customers reporting 90%-95% compression and amazing performance improvements, the DB2 vs. Oracle performance comparison is a great story to tell.

Most importantly, however, is helping current and prospective IBM customers understand where IBM’s efforts to compete directly with Oracle will deliver the most benefit to their organizations.  Whether it’s cost, performance, or simplifying their in-house database environment, we want to help each one understand why and how IBM has the lead.

I hope you will join us!

Join IBM DB2 Competitive Sales Specialist Bill Kincaid and me for The Mid-Atlantic Information Management Virtual Users Group webinar on February 28th.  The Mid-Atlantic Information Management Virtual Users Group is focused on delivering information and education to DB2 users in the Mid-Atlantic region.  Given the topic and the terrific speaker lined up, and since the session will be delivered via webinar, anyone interested in IBM database solutions is welcome to join us.
 
In the session current DB2 customers will learn how IBM has enhanced DB2 administrative tool functionality, added new features, and is offering new product bundles that deliver better value at a lower cost.  Customers considering DB2 will learn how IBM is providing better assessment tools and easier migration processes to simplify the transition to DB2. 
 
Is DB2 the best?  Is moving to DB2 a no-brainer?  Join us, ask questions, and learn more about today’s DB2. 
 
Date:  Thursday, February 28, 2013
Time:  11am – 12:00pm Eastern
Registration is required.  Please register here. 
 
Bill Kincaid
Bill Kincaid is the IBM DB2 Competitive Sales Specialist for the Mid-Atlantic Region.  Bill has worked for IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, as well as data virtualization solution developer xkoto.  Bill’s specialty is helping database users – customers currently using DB2 and customers considering migrating to DB2 – to fully understand the value of DB2.  Bill earned his BA at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte and his MBA from the University of Georgia.  He lives in Charlotte and works with IBM customers in the Eastern US.
 
I hope you will join us.

From IBM’s Beth Flood:

…We also took the opportunity to announce some other Champion awards for 2011 and the categories and winners are:

Champion of the Year:   Bernie O’Connor
Evangelist of the Year:   Mark Lack
Blogger of the Year:    Jim Harris
Special Recognition (Most significant displacement of Oracle to date):   Frank Fillmore

CONGRATULATIONS to all of our winners.

Great job, Frank!!

Whew!  The last four months have been a whirlwind.  A colleague, Jim Herrmann, and I have been working since March on data migration from Oracle to DB2 for a worldwide Top 50 integrated financial services firm.  A team of specialists from IBM and The Fillmore Group – including Joe Geller, Teresa Wan, Rebecca Bond, and John Schatko – assisted the customer with all aspects of application performance testing and tuning, code remediation, and data migration.  On Sunday, July 17 the production cutover occurred – and it was a huge success.  Props especially to IBMers Jeff Richardson, Jay Lennox, and Christian Zentgraf for providing technology leadership.

One of the keys to the migration of the data was the need to limit the site outage into a window no longer than 12 hours, from midnight to around noon on Sunday.  For an earlier migration, smaller in terms of data volume, the customer had successfully used the IBM Data Movement Tool (IDMT).  Given the metrics of the latest migration, the IDMT approach alone would have required an outage of up to 5 days – unacceptable for an online banking system on which millions of customer rely to pay bills and check balances.

The Fillmore Group proposed using InfoSphere Replication Server (Q Replication) to copy updates to the live OLTP data from Oracle to DB2 while the batch IDMT was running asynchronously to move the data from Oracle to DB2 tables.  By using IDMT and Q Replication in combination, we were able to reduce the outage to a much more manageable 12 hours.

We followed a template The Fillmore Group had used in 2010 at Constant Contact for their no-outage upgrade from DB2 for Linux, Unix, Windows v8.2 to DB2 v9.5.  Dan Berry and Sankar Padhi delivered a detailed technical overview of that project at the IBM Information On Demand conference last year: Zero Downtime Upgrades Using Q-REP at Constant Contact  The Oracle migration was incrementally more complex, but not all that difficult.

IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, Serge Rielau, has authored a comprehensive, yet concise, overview of DB2’s support for Oracle application PL/SQL, datatypes, functions, and other APIs: “Run Oracle applications on DB2 9.7 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows“.

IBM reports more than 1,000 customers have made the switch from Oracle to DB2.  Are you paying too much for your database software?

If you will be in Baltimore on May 6th please join us!

Do you know the cost of capturing a change in your production database systems?  Does it cost an extra $100,000 per month to capture that change – and then is the change moved to a data warehouse that’s left many users dissatisfied?  We have a solution, InfoSphere Change Data Capture.

The Fillmore Group is teaming with IBM for a *free* lunch session at Orioles Park at Camden Yards, from 11am to 1pm, where we will explain how InfoSphere Change Data Capture can do an intelligent capture on heterogeneous databases to:  1) create an audit trail detailing who did what and when, 2) replace inefficient staging of changes on your mainframe, 3) eliminate the overhead and instability of ad hoc queries, 4) remove the inefficiency of triggers and message queues, and 5) reduce mainframe costs by $1 million per year – reliably feed downstream ETL, MDM, or SOA applications.

If you are interested in attending, click here for more information.  See you at the Yard!

In doing some co-marketing planning with the local IBM team there is clearly a lot of energy behind the push to move Oracle users to DB2.  With V9.7 the claim is that 95% of all Oracle application code will run – untouched – in DB2 V9.7.  So the IBM teams (and me) are looking at customers using both DB2 and Oracle as targets to move to 100% DB2 in 2010. 

I am accumulating information on the migration process and trying to figure out how to accomplish it quickly – and therefore as inexpensively as possible.  I want the ROI to show a return fast!  There is a tool to estimate the migration effort which can then be used to estimate the cost.  It’s 2010 – it’s so much easier than these things used to be…in fact, in looking at older migration plans, Frank dug up a white paper comparing Oracle and DB2 V6.1 that includes migration information.  It’s 148 pages long…take a look (at the link below) if you have absolutely nothing else to do.

Of course, in the world of new reseller programs, ValueNet and Software Advantage Plus, and so on, I must mention The Fillmore Group has a competitive migration VAP in place to enable us to sell DB2 to Oracle users for the best prices anywhere.  Call me if you want to make the change.  Go DB2!

http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/products/White_Papers/Application_Performance/indepth_db2_migration_wp.pdf

Just announced – The Fillmore Group will host four Optim sessions with the IBM team, featuring Paul Westfall, on Thursday, January 7th, from 9am – 3:30.  If you are “local” and interested in learning more about Optim (regardless of your database of choice), I hope you will join us.  More info below:

Enterprise applications and databases don’t just help run your business – they ARE your business.  And every year, they grow in size and complexity – making them harder and more complicated to manage.

IBM® Optim™ gives you the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle – regardless of the relational database your organization uses.  These sessions will introduce the Optim products that can enable you to meet your service level agreements, decrease maintenance costs and protect data privacy and security, reducing your legal liability exposure, whether you use Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2 – any or all! Read More…

Most of you are aware that DB2 9 for LUW delivers PL/SQL APIs in v9.7.  That is, you can run Oracle applications against DB2 for LUW databases with little or no modification.  What you might not have heard is that IBM’s high availability, low-latency replication product – Q Replication – will now natively capture changes natively in Oracle logs.  That is, you can replication your Oracle Financials to a InfoSphere Warehouse.  Q Replication is a feature of IBM’s InfoSphere Replication Server, so you might not have noticed the new functionality with all of the name changes.

Two links describe the enhancement.  David Tolleson and Ed Lynch of IBM have both provided good information on the specifications and details.