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Martin Hubel
Gold Consultant
Martin Hubel Consulting has done work in 26 countries and 37 states in the United States, and we help customers with performance issues, application design issues and system administration issues such as recovery.
With DB2 9 coming out we were very excited about this version because it had features that would help our customers process more work faster and save them money.
At Auto Zone, a large automotive retailer, they have a large warehouse on DB2 on AIX. This warehouse has roughly eight to 10 terabytes of data in it. I knew with the size of their fact tables that they would receive good benefits from using DB2 9 data compression.
And in fact, those results were much better than IBM had led us to originally believe. And what we saw is compression in the area of 80 percent on a fact table and other the other dimension tables that were of a good size we had numbers in the area of 77 percent. We also saw dramatic improvements in elapsed time in processing the workload. We had improvements of 42 percent.
A second customer where I tried data compression was a medium-sized trucking company. This company runs 250 transactions per second and based on that amount of activity, I thought the data compression would also provide benefits to them. The results I saw were again, very good. We're seeing anywhere between 57 to 75 percent compression on the tables.
My trucking company client has 1,500 trucks on the road 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're constantly updating data and DB2 tables. This made them an ideal client to use High Availability Disaster Recovery, or HADR.
The HADR implementation was done very quickly and easily really in about a day. This customer has had increased confidence knowing that every transaction is instantly backed up to the standby database. Overall, I see high value in DB2 9 for my customers, and I'm recommending that they all move to this new version.