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Optimizing analytic workloads using DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration

By Rahul Kumar posted Fri December 02, 2022 08:04 AM

  

Executive summary

DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration is a combination of complementary innovations from IBM that simplifies and speeds up analytic workloads. It is easy to implement and is self-optimizing. BLU Acceleration can typically eliminate the need for indexes, aggregates (for example, MQTs or materialized views), or time-consuming database tuning to achieve top performance and storage efficiency. In most cases, no SQL or schema changes are required to take advantage of this breakthrough technology.

These innovations, which are introduced in DB2® for Linux®, UNIX ®, and Windows® Version 10.5 (DB2 10.5), are designed to help you quickly find answers to more complex business questions while keeping costs down.

DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration offers a rich set of features that help you to meet these goals, including column-organized storage, actionable compression, parallel vector processing, and data skipping. In combination, these features provide an in-memory, CPU-optimized, and I/O-optimized solution.

This paper gives you an overview of these technologies, recommendations on hardware and software selection, guidelines for identifying the optimal workloads for BLU Acceleration, and information about capacity planning, memory, and I/O. A section on system configuration shows you how IBM’s focus on simplicity enables you to set up DB2 10.5 so that it automatically makes optimal configuration choices for analytic workloads. Other sections describe how to implement and use DB2 with BLU Acceleration. The focus of this best practices paper is on ease of use. You will learn how BLU Acceleration works and what it is doing “under the covers”, which will give you a real appreciation of the simplicity that is built into BLU Acceleration and show you that it really does deliver “super analytics, super easy”.

Introduction

BLU Acceleration is a new collection of technologies for analytic queries that are introduced in DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows Version 10.5 (DB2 10.51). At its heart, BLU Acceleration is about providing faster answers to more questions and analyzing more data at a lower cost. DB2 with BLU Acceleration is about providing order-of-magnitude benefits in performance, storage savings, and time to value.

These goals are accomplished by using multiple complementary technologies, including:
  • The data is in a column store, meaning that I/O is performed only on those columns and values that satisfy a particular query.
  • The column data is compressed with actionable compression, which preserves order so that the data can be used without decompression, resulting in huge storage and CPU savings and a significantly higher density of useful data held in memory.
  • Parallel vector processing, with multi-core parallelism and single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) parallelism, provides improved performance and better utilization of available CPU resources.
  • Data skipping avoids the unnecessary processing of irrelevant data, thereby further reducing the I/O that is required to complete a query.
These and other technologies combine to provide an in-memory, CPU-optimized, and I/O-optimized solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

BLU Acceleration is fully integrated into DB2 10.5, so that much of how you leverage DB2 in your analytics environment today still applies when you adopt BLU Acceleration. The simplicity of BLU Acceleration changes how you implement and manage a BLUaccelerated environment. Gone are the days of having to define secondary indexes or aggregates, or having to make SQL or schema changes to achieve adequate performance.

This best practices paper focuses as much on “what you no longer need to do” as on “what you should do”. We direct your attention to a few key implementation items, and then you can let BLU Acceleration take over and provide you with optimal performance. It is analytics that is super fast and super easy – just load and go!

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