Is your business growing? Do you need to store higher volumes of data in IBM® IMS databases? And are you concerned about how you will manage these large databases? Well, your friends at the IBM IMS lab in Silicon Valley have come up with a solution to increase the limit on Fast Path DEDB areas.
First, what's so great about DEDB areas?
For decades, IMS has provided the Fast Path DEDBs (data entry databases), which, among other benefits, provide for database partitioning. Each partition is referred to as an area. The benefits of areas (or database partitioning) are:
- Each area can be managed and accessed separately.
- Areas can improve scalability, reduce contention, and optimize performance.
- Areas can provide a way to divide data by usage pattern.
Area size limits (before this enhancement)
Until now, DEDBs have been restricted to a maximum of 2,048 areas. Because the maximum size of each area is 4 GB, that limits the size of a single DEDB database to roughly a little over 8 terabytes. While 8 terabytes of data might seem like a lot of data, in today’s digital world, that's tiny.
Don’t believe us?
Consider this: 8 terabytes of data is roughly equivalent to only 128 (64 GB) mobile phones! So, 8 terabytes of data is not all that much, and in this data-driven world, many IMS customers (due to growing business workloads) were nearing the 2,048 area limitation.
Limits? What limits? (with this enhancement)
IMS now offers an enhancement that allows DEDB databases to have up to 9,999 areas. Given that the maximum size of each area is 4 GB, this allows a single IMS DEDB database to grow to roughly 40 terabytes of data!
Let me repeat that: 40…terabytes…of…data!
And you get the same benefits from DEDB areas that you've come to expect:
- Availability
- Scalability
- Performance
- Operational flexibility
Function levels—like having an easy button
In addition, this enhancement was built with the IMS function level enhancement concept. With function levels, you can activate or deactivate the function with a simple type 2 command.
For example, if you want to activate this “DEDB greater than 2K areas” enhancement, simply enter the following type 2 command in your IMS system:
UPD IMSFUNC NAME(DEDBGT2K) SET(ENABLED(Y))
If you want to disable this function, enter this type 2 command:
UPD IMSFUNC NAME(DEDBGT2K) SET(ENABLED(N))
Grab the PTFs and expand those DEDB areas
This enhancement is shipped as part of APAR PH12671/PTFs UI78774 and UI78775.
So, go ahead—store more data in IMS DEDB databases, and have that peace of mind that as the data grows, you can continue to have operational flexibility, scalability, availability, and the performance you have come to expect from IMS.
Don't forget to visit IMS Central to find more IMS training content, what's new, and links to documentation and support.
Brought to you by the visionary and cool members of the IMS database development team where innovation is the norm.