One of the issues that users have raised to me is the impedance mismatch between our web-based tools and our eclipse-based tools, in particular, between InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager (Performance Manager) and InfoSphere Optim Query Workload Tuner (Query Tuner). Query Tuner availability on the Eclipse platform grew out of our rich investment in Eclipse and our strategy to drive improved query performance early in the development cycle. Thus, key integration with Data Studio and Rational development features were, and continue to be, highly valued.

Key use cases for performance management involve using Performance Manager to identify high cost queries and transfer them to Query Tuner for analysis and advice.  Performance Manager makes it easy to identify high cost queries (either long running queries or short queries that are costly in aggregate) or to identify query workloads that are not meeting their response time targets. The handshake between Performance Manager and Query Tuner provides the full problem identification through problem resolution support. However, Performance Manager provides a web console and Query Tuner is an Eclipse-based client, so there is a transition that can be unexpected, and for some, unwelcome. With the new releases coming in June, we are embarking on delivering query tuning features directly in the web console!  This release is a first step, so all features are not available, but it is indicative of our direction to make the cycle of problem identification through problem resolution a seamless experience. When the Eclipse client is installed and open, we will still transfer the queries to the Eclipse client since it has the full query tuning function.

Features available from the web will now include the ability to:

1. Re-explain a query or workload
2. Format and annotate a SQL statement
3. Get statistics advice for a query or workload
4. Get index advice for a query or workload
5. Generate, store, and share reports containing the advice

The screen capture below previews the query tuning tab right inside the Performance Manager web console. The embedded job manager in Performance Manager is used to execute the query tuning jobs. All the submitted query tuning jobs can be viewed and selected in the grid including their status and progress.

Features still requiring the Eclipse client are:

1. Visual Explain and Access Path Explorer (yes, we know this is a priority and we are working on it )
2. Access Plan Advice and Workload Access Plan Advice
3. Access Plan Compare and Workload Access Plan Compare
4. Query Advice
5. Statistical View Advice
6. Materialized Query Tables Advice
7. Multidimensional Clustering Advice
8. Partition Distribution Advice
9. Table Organization Advice (new in this Query Tuner release in support of BLU Acceleration)
10. Test Candidate Indexes
11. Plan Hints Support
12. Workload Capture (from other sources) and Workload Management

Also, you still need the Query Tuner license activated on the target database to be able to use the function from the Performance Manager web console. The license activation capability is still in the Query Tuner Eclipse client.

Hope you will enjoy this new function. Give us some feedback on our Query Tuner forum or post a question here.

May is nearly over, but before it ends, take part in these two upcoming free webinars to learn more about DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration.  Both special guest speakers of these webinars were authors of the chapter excerpt specifically about BLU from an upcoming Flashbook: DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration

Breaking News from IBM on DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows!

Friday May 24, 11:00 am - 12:00 noon ET

DB2Night Show with George Baklarz

During Episode #111, George Baklarz from IBM will share latest news for IBM DB2 LUW.  Of course this news will relate to the features that were recently announced for DB2 10.5, including BLU, pureScale enhancements, JSON preview and SQL.  

Deep Dive on BLU Acceleration in DB2 10.5, Super Analytics Super Easy

Thursday, May 30: 12:30 – 2:00 pm ET

DB2 Tech Talk with Sam Lightstone

BLU Acceleration in DB2 10.5 for Linux, UNIX and Windows delivers results from data-intensive analytic workloads with speed and precision that is termed ʺspeed of thoughtʺ analytics.  Join IBM Distinguished Engineer and DB2 expert Sam Lightstone for an in-depth discussion of the all-new BLU Acceleration features in DB2 10.5.  In this deep dive, Sam will explain capabilities such as dynamic in-memory analytics, parallel vector processing, enhanced columnar storage techniques, actionable compression, and more.

More about BLU

New Flashbook: DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration

Read the chapter excerpt specifically about BLU from an upcoming Flashbook.  The authors include Paul Zikopoulos, Matthew Huras, George Baklarz, Sam Lightstone, and Aamer Sachedina

DB2 Tech Bits: Hear impressions of BLU from IBM Champions

Thanks to IBM Champions Jean-Marc Blaise, Iqbal Gorawalla, and Tony Winch who joined Rick Swagerman on a special edition of Tech Talks, called Tech Bits, to share their impressions of the new DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration. These are short but very informative and worth the time it takes to listen.

Replay of May 8 Tech Talk: Introduction and Technical Tour: DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration

Listen to Berni Schiefer to find out about enhancements to DB2 pureScale that make it even more able to deliver always available transactions. You’ll also learn about updates to SQL, Oracle Database compatibility, business-ready NoSQL technology and additional NoSQL plans.  

Customer Success Story Videos

More are added all the time.  Hear directly from customers who spent time using the new technology with their own data and how the technology fared.

Super Analytics, Super Easy: Introducing IBM DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration

Read this article that was published on April 3, 2013 in the IBM Data Magazine (ibmdatamag.com) by Guy Lohman, Sam Lightstone and Berni Schiefer.  “Imagine a database technology that gives you 10-20 times faster performance right out of the box, requires dramatically less storage, and nearly eliminates the need for tuning. Too good to be true?  Not anymore.”

Try BLU yourself via the IBM DB2 Technology Preview

If you are a developer or DBA and are interested in DB2, take this opportunity to preview emerging technologies that are still in the lab.  IBM wants to collaborate with you early in technology conception, prototyping, and iterative development cycles. These technologies may or may not be aligned with announced products. The features or technologies in the download do not represent a commitment or obligation on the part of IBM.

Enjoy the webinars!  Learn as much as you can, because when this code is available, you’ll want to start using it in production.

Susan

Rick Swagerman who took over as the DB2 Tech Talks Host from Serge Rielau has just recorded two Tech bits.  Tech bits are shorter recordings on  topics related to DB2.  These two bits are both conversations with IBM Champions to hear their impressions of the latest technology being delivered in DB2 10.5.  

These champions have taken part in the early access beta program for the past few months and were very impressed with what they found and were excited to share their impressions with you:

IBM Champions Jean-Marc-Blaise and Iqbal Gorawalla on BLU Acceleration in DB2 10.5

This is a single Tech Bit and is 24 minutes in length.

See also Iqbal’s blog on this topic: DB2 10.5 Addresses Big Data Challenges with BLU Acceleration

IBM Champion Tony Winch on BLU Acceleration in DB2 10.5

(about 10 mins in length)

For more about DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration, see my previous blog entry  Do you know BLU? and look for another blog entry that I’ll post shortly.

Thanks Tony, Iqbal and Jean-Marc for sharing your impressions of this new technology!

Susan

Introduction:

IBM® DB2® pureScale® (also known as DB2 application cluster transparency) feature introduced clustering technology to DB2 on distributed platforms, so you can deploy continuously available and scalable database clusters. The technology is based on the IBM DB2 for z/OS® architecture that businesses worldwide trust for their most critical systems.

IBM InfoSphere® Optim™ Configuration Manager for DB2 for LUW V3.1 (OCM) includes the following capabilities for IBM DB2 pureScale® feature:

1. Tune the workload balancing properties of driver connection pooling on DB2 pureScale
2. Use OCM as a central console to review the following DB2 pureScale information
   • DBCFG, DBMCFG parameters
   • Product and license information
   • DB2 pureScale group, members and cluster caching facility (also known as CF) information
   • Architecture levels for the entire DB2 pureScale setup
3. Compare one DB2 pureScale environment (test) with another (production)
   • ​Automate compare jobs to generate alerts when configurations deviate
4. Review differences in configuration settings, database objects, and keep them in sync
5. Support for rolling upgrades of DB2 pureScale
6. Isolate application transactions to certain members of a DB2 pureScale group
7. Throttle application connection to ensure mission critical applications are not starved of resources

Although there are many capabilities in OCM V3.1 for IBM DB2 pureScale® feature, this blog entry focuses on the isolate application transactions capability (#6 in the above list).

Isolate Application using Optim Configuration Manager:

Isolate applications on DB2 pureScale capability allows DBAs to isolate application workloads to certain members of a DB2 pureScale group. This capability is invaluable for enterprises when they want to:

1. Isolate misbehaving applications and protect mission critical applications from cascading effects of the misbehaving applications
2. Test new applications with production data in a limited capacity environment

I’ll use an example to describe this capability, the figure below shows the application “A” and “B” running on against a DB2 pureScale group. DB2 pureScale member “2” has been identified as the member on which isolated applications will execute (penalty box).

Misbehaving applications can be identified by IBM InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager for DB2 for LUW (OPM). In the example, application “B” is the misbehaving application and as a result the resources available to application “A” are impacted. The mission critical application “A” therefore has poor response times and the effect cascades to any other applications running on the DB2 pureScale group.  

OCM can be invoked from the OPM dashboard.

You can define and use client rules in OCM to control applications connecting to DB2 for LUW servers. Additionally, rules can be used to control drivers, data sources, and transactions of user applications and the connections to DB2 for LUW servers. You can create client rules for managed clients only. Managed clients are those clients on which IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Tools Runtime Client is installed. Before you create a rule, you first need to create a rule set, which is a named group of rules.

A rule with “Isolate application transactions” type can be defined which isolates a resource-consuming application on DB2 pureScale to a restricted environment so that other applications can obtain the resources they need to perform optimally. This rule moves an application, a group of applications, or a workload within an application to a pre-configured location alias (penalty box) of a specific member in a DB2 pureScale.

Steps to isolate an application to specific DB2 pureScale member(s) in Optim Configuration Manager:

The following steps are not comprehensive; I’ve attempted to highlight the steps involved in isolating an application.

Step 1: Setup up a location alias for members in a DB2 pureScale group

For a DB2 pureScale group, you can define or update DB2 pureScale aliases using a DB2 call to the SYSPROC.WLM_CREATE_MEMBER_SUBSET  stored procedure.

For example to create a location alias called MY_PBOX for DB2 pureScale member ID 2:

CALL SYSPROC.WLM_CREATE_MEMBER_SUBSET(

   'MY_PBOX',

   '<memberPriorityBasis>equalPriority</memberPriorityBasis>

    <databaseAlias>PBOX</databaseAlias>',

   '(2)' )

A location alias represents one, a subset, or all members of a data sharing group.

The following screen shot shows location aliases ALIAS1 for DB2 pureScale member ID 1, ALIAS01 for DB2 pureScale member ID 0 and 1, and PBOX for DB2 pureScale member ID 2.

Step 2: Define a rule to isolate an application

To create a rule for a managed client, choose Open > Managed Clients, select the application client and click on “Add Rule…”.

The “Rule Set Manager” tab is opened and the Rule Set name, which was automatically created when the connection to the DB2 pureScale server was defined, is automatically filled in. Specify any Name for the rule (“PBOX” in the following screen shot) and Isolate Application Transactions as the Action to be performed by this rule.

The conditions for identifying the client application are automatically filled in as shown in the screen shot below. Edit the conditions if necessary.

In the Action tab specify the Alias Name to isolate the application to certain member(s) of the DB2 pureScale group.

Save the Rule Set.

Step 3: Activate the rule set

Activate the rule set. Once the rule set has been activated, OCM directs new connections to the DB2 pureScale members identified by the location alias “PBOX”.

The following screen shot shows the activated Rule Set.

A couple of years ago, an author who I’ve worked with on a few projects, Dan Wolfson, introduced me to his friend Mandy Chessell who was interested in writing a book.  A few months later, Mandy was in Toronto and we met to discuss her book.  She told me that it was based on work that she was doing with her clients and that many of her clients were very excited to get their hands on this book.

Mandy showed me the work that she had already completed and I was astounded at the level of completeness and quality that she had already put into the book.  I introduced her to the people at IBM Press and the book was accepted and after much more work... the book is complete and will publish next week!  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the book and intend to read it cover to cover.

Here are details about the book, Mandy, and her co-author Harald Smith.

Patterns of Information Management

By Mandy Chessell, Harald Smith

Use Best Practice Patterns to Understand and Architect Manageable, Efficient Information Supply Chains That Help You Leverage All Your Data and Knowledge

In the era of “Big Data,” information pervades every aspect of the organization. Therefore, architecting and managing it is a multi-disciplinary task. Now, two pioneering IBM architects present proven architecture patterns that fully reflect this reality. Using their pattern language, you can accurately characterize the information issues associated with your own systems, and design solutions that succeed over both the short- and long-term.

Building on the analogy of a supply chain, Mandy Chessell and Harald C. Smith explain how information can be transformed, enriched, reconciled, redistributed, and utilized in even the most complex environments. Through a realistic, end-to-end case study, they help you blend overlapping information management, SOA, and BPM technologies that are often viewed as competitive.

Using this book’s patterns, you can integrate all levels of your architecture–from holistic, enterprise, system-level views down to low-level design elements. You can fully address key non-functional requirements such as the amount, quality, and pace of incoming data. Above all, you can create an IT landscape that is coherent, interconnected, efficient, effective, and manageable.

Coverage Includes:

• Understanding how a pattern language can help you address key information management challenges

• Defining information strategy and governance for organizations and users

• Creating orderly information flows you can reuse and synchronize as needed

• Managing information structure, meaning, and lifecycles

• Providing for efficient information access and storage when deploying new IT capabilities

• Moving information efficiently and reliably to support your processes

• Determining how information should be processed and maintained

• Improving quality and accessibility, and supporting higher-value analytics

• Protecting information via validation, transformation, enrichment, correction, security, and monitoring

• Planning new information management projects in the context of your existing IT resources

About the authors:

Mandy Chessell

FREng CEng FBCS

Mandy has worked for IBM since 1987. She is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Master Inventor, and member of the IBM Academy of Technology Leadership Team. As the chief architect for InfoSphere® Solutions in IBM’s Software Group, Mandy designs common information integration patterns for different industries and solutions.

In earlier roles, Mandy’s work has focused on transaction processing, event management, business process management, information management, and model-driven development. This breadth is reflected in her invention portfolio, which to date stands at over 50 issued patents worldwide.

Outside of IBM, Mandy is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield, UK. In 2001, she was the first woman to be awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering, and in 2000, she was one of the “TR100” young innovators identified by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. In 2006, she won a British Female Innovators and Inventors Network (BFIIN) “Building Capability” award for her work developing innovative people and the BlackBerry “2006 Best Woman in Technology - Corporate Sector” award. More recently, she was granted an honorary fellowship of the Institution for Engineering Designers (IED) and she won the “2012 everywoman Innovator of the Year.” For more information on Mandy’s publications, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Chessell.

Harald Smith

Harald has worked for IBM since 2005. Harald is a software architect in IBM’s Software Group specializing in information quality, integration, and governance products, and is IBM certified in delivering IBM Information Management solutions. In this role, he develops best practices, methodology, and accelerators for common information integration use cases.

Harald has 30 years of experience working with data quality products and solutions; product and project management; application development and delivery; system auditing; technical services; and business processes across the software, financial services, healthcare, and education sectors. Harald was the product manager at Ascential® Software and IBM responsible for designing and bringing the IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer product to market as a key component in IBM’s information quality portfolio. He has been issued three patents in the field of information quality and rule discovery and was recently recognized as an IBM developer- Works Contributing Author.

His publications include the IBM developerWorks articles “The information perspective of SOA design” [parts 6, 7, and 8], “Use IBM WebSphere® AuditStage in a federated database environment,” “Using pre-built rule definitions with IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer,” “Designing an integration landscape with IBM InfoSphere Foundation Tools and Information Server” [part 1], and “Best practices for IBM InfoSphere Blueprint Director” [parts 1 and 2]. For the IBM InfoSphere Information Server documentation, Harald contributed to the “IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer Methodology and Best Practices Guide” and “IBM InfoSphere Information Server Integration Scenario Guide”; he has also contributed to three IBM Redbooks®.

You can pre-order this book from the IBM Press bookstore.

Remember if you are an IDUG member, you are entitled to 45% off all IBM Press books, including this one.  Find the secret code on the IDUG.ORG site after you sign in.

Susan

IBM Innovate 2013 is a Technical Summit that provides insights that you need to stay ahead..... and it takes place June 2 - 6 in Orlando Florida.

This Summit offers over 450 outcome-driven sessions, including quite a few that are focused on the ever popular Big Data area.  If you are attending the conference, you should consider attending these Big Data sessions:

BD-1962 : Agility in a Relational Database World - Dynamic Schema with JSON and DB2

Speaker:  William Bireley, IBM

Today's mobile, social, and analytic applications demand agility, speed, and scalability using a flexible data model. This partly explains the huge interest in NoSQL databases. Modern applications frequently need to add, drop, or modify fields in the data store without administrator involvement. Change management processes associated with relational databases can be an impediment to continuous integration processes. A popular NoSQL approach is the use of a "document database", where documents are stored with a flexible format, such as JSON. Many existing NoSQL solutions offer these advantages, but sacrifice "ACID" characteristics of a traditional database, such as transaction control, recover-ability, and other aspects taken for granted in DB2. Using DB2 as a JSON document store provides the best of both worlds. This session describes a solution that does exactly that. The session also includes a live demo showing the power and flexibility of this JSON over DB2 solution.

BD-2501 : Big Data Predictive Analytics

Speaker: Mike McRoberts, IBM

Learn about the new Big Data feature in IBM SPSS Modeler and how to automate and integrate this capability into your application. You don't have to worry about Map/Reduce programming to take advantage of predictive analytics on Big Data.

SC-2486 : Cloud and DevOps: Big Demands, Big Iron

Speakers: Phil Murphy, Forrester; Hayden Lindsey, IBM

DevOps is changing how software is delivered, but how does it fit into your shop? The demands of delivering applications across mobile, social, big data, and cloud technologies are driving development teams to use many different types of technology. Furthermore, Agile methodologies are enabling development teams to deliver usable application features on quicker schedules. This is now happening for application development on all platforms, in private datacenters and public clouds. Learn how your organization measures up as Phil Murphy, VP and Research Director with Forrester Research, presents fresh research on the impact of these technology trends on IT organizations. Listen as Hayden Lindsey, IBM VP and Distinguished Engineer, discusses how software from IBM Rational brings agility to all of your development environments, from mobile apps to mainframe environments.

CLD-2185 : Developing in the Cloud? Turning Challenges into Opportunities

Speaker: Todd Moore, IBM

Address the increasing challenges of meeting the requirements of your customers. Reduce the pressures on development to deploy new services. Address the challenges by leveraging technologies that can develop once and deploy anywhere. Maximize the power of the cloud, while streamlining your development processes to include Mobile, Social, Big Data, and Business Analytics. Understand how OpenStack is providing flexibility in architecting your cloud. Learn how OSLC and TOSCA are integral to simplifying and accelerating your development processes. Todd Moore of IBM and Jay Snyder of Aetna Insurance will take you through their experiences on how they enabled their developer community to leverage these leading technologies to effectively deliver interoperable solutions. By the end of the session, you will understand how to take your team's development processes to the next level and be more responsive in meeting the needs of your customers.

BD-2498 : InfoSphere BigInsights Programming Overview

Speaker: Anshul Dawra, IBM

Get the most from your Big Data by developing new applications. We'll cover the popular programming styles for Big Data, including Map-Reduce, HBase, SQL and Hive, Jaql, Pig, and Text Analytics. We'll show how to create new applications from spreadsheets and display the results graphically. Learn how developers and end users can leverage big data with simple yet powerful programming styles.

BD-2499 : InfoSphere Streams Programming Overview

Speaker: Pete Nicholls, IBM

Big Data is everywhere we look. In late 2012, IBM conducted an audited benchmark illustrating how IBM Platform Symphony delivered a dramatic 7.3 times performance gain across a range of representative Hadoop MapReduce workloads. While the performance results are compelling, for many organizations the real value lies in associated opportunities for cost savings that arise from greater efficiency and resource sharing on a multi-tenant grid infrastructure. In this session, we will explain the benchmarks and results, detail the technologies that enabled the results, and discuss how organizations can take advantage of low-latency scheduling and new file system technologies to achieve dramatic efficiency improvements in their own Big Data projects. IBM will also unveil a total cost of ownership calculator that can help organizations estimate cost savings opportunities for a variety of distributed computing workloads including Hadoop MapReduce.

BD-2510 : Lightning fast access to Data with IBM Caching

Speaker: Brian Martin, IBM

Traditionally, data is placed in storage and when needed, accessed and acted upon in memory. This results in a natural bottleneck that impacts performance. As data volumes increase, the time required to access and analyze grows and becomes cumbersome. Complex calculation can't be accomplished in real time. With in-memory computing, we can better understand how data is shaped and stored. In this session, we will discuss how in-memory data grids like WXS & XC10 mark an inflection point for enterprise applications, especially with big data. Real-time information provides decision makers with insights not previously available. The session will cover how large data sets can be made available and accessed near-instantaneously.

BD-2511 : Test Data Management in the New Era of Computing

Speaker: Swati Moran, IBM

Big data means high volume, variety, velocity and veracity data. Most development and testing organizations aren't prepared to develop and test applications in this high pressure environment. Clients demand access and high availability. In the rush to meet growing client needs and build applications to support the speed of business, testing becomes even more critical. This session will explore best practices for test data management in the software development lifecycle to satisfy the demands of big data, while protecting sensitive data. In addition, it will explain how to speed delivery of big data applications while reducing cost by enabling testers and developers to access and refresh test data.

BD-2049 : Three Steps for Securing Big Data Environments - Why Big Data Doesn't Have to Mean Big Security Challenges

Speaker: Kimberly Madia, IBM

The ability to harness big data has opened the door for world-wide collaboration in real time. Organizations are able to process data on an extreme scale to derive maximum value. However, as big data environments ingest more data, organizations will face significant risks and threats to the repositories containing this data. Failure to ensure data security reduces confidence in decision making. Ironically, organizations are generating more data now as compared to any other point in history, and yet they don't understand how to protect it. In this session, we will discuss three steps to improve security in big data environments.

Susan