Friday, December 12, 2014

New fixpack for DB2 10.5 brings in-memory analytics to Windows and zLinux

The new DB2 10.5 Fixpack 5 is available since today. A high-level overview of new features and enhancements can be found in the fixpack summary in the DB2 Knowledge Center. The list of all available DB2 fixpacks is available in the IBM Support Portal for DB2. There you will also find the links to download this new fixpack and a list of fixed bugs.

After this introduction I would like to point out two product enhancements that are included in this fixpack:

As you may know, "BLU Acceleration" is the technology codename for highly optimized in-memory analytics that is deeply integrated into the supported platforms. It is not just another column store, but optimizes the data flow from disk to the CPU registers to efficiently use the available processing power and memory resources. DB2 is also exploiting special CPU instruction sets, e.g., on the POWER platform, for faster data processing. With the fixpack 5 this technology is available now on Microsoft Windows and for Linux on zSeries.

Another feature enhancement is the new ability to specify which network interface cards (NICs) DB2 should use, if you have multiple. A new file nicbinding.cfg can be used to set up the bindings. If you had to deal with db2nodes.cfg before, then the syntax will look familiar.

That's all for my quick summary. Enjoy the weekend AND DB2.