What is Db2 ? The IBM Database explained

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What is Db2

DB2 is a family of hybrid data management products designed to manage structured and unstructured data. It is mainly a Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) first introduced by IBM in 1983. The name Db2 was indicating a change, a new version in the database world from hierarchical to relational. It’s a full featured database engine capable of handling large quantities of data and concurrently serving many users. It implements the standard concepts of a relational database, as well as the SQL standard query language (transaction processing) that is available on relational database systems.

Db2 continues to deliver innovation as an industry-leading platform for efficient hybrid data management. It is built on an intelligent common SQL engine designed for scalability and flexibility using Machine Learning.

Db2 is a fully proprietary product to IBM, but there are free distribution of community edition.

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Platforms : Db2 LUW and Db2 for z/OS

DB2 is an example of the hybrid cloud direction as it can be used and purchased as a complete hardware mainframe or used through the cloud and hybrid cloud. DB2 was initially designed to run on IBM mainframe platforms, which are basically optimized powerful computers. Those mainframes were and still are running under specific Operating System (OS) like z/OS or IBM iSeries. Fortunately, since some years already DB2 was ported to the other famous Operating Systems : Linux, UNIX and Windows (LUW).

Between Db2 LUW and Db2 z/OS there are implementation differences and they are considered as 2 different products. You can use Db2 through big mainframes on dedicated hardware or as a service in the cloud.

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Db2 today

Since the original DB2 version, IBM continued to develop and improve the database engine until today. It possess many versions running on different platforms. According to IBM, DB2 leads in terms of database market share and performance. In fact, even if DB2 is an old and known product it evolved over time and the biggest transactional systems in the world are still using Db2. The industries using DB2 are varied but the most important ones are in the Information Technology, Recruiting, Insurance, Finance or Banking sectors because like all the products from IBM there is an important trust from the customers regarding the security and privacy of critical data.

However, Db2 lost some market share like his competitors Oracle or MS SQL Server due to the adoption of open-source engines like MySQL or Postgres.

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What features are available in Db2

Db2 offers all the main features required in a relational database. It ensures data integrity by default and gives multiple recovery options to cover any disaster scenarios. Moreover, it has different formats of multi-server clustering for High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) and to process large dataset using massive computing power.

You can select the database as a Column-oriented for analytics (OLAP) or as a Row-oriented database for transactional processing. Db2 is appropriate for both orientations, high-volume OLTP environment or huge OLAP data warehouses and analytics environment.

In general, the big Db2 systems are used as an Online Transaction processing (OLTP) environment, or transactional environment which means a database management system designed to optimize the processing of short, real-time transactions/queries where the data changes constantly.

To illustrate this concept, DB2 can be purchased by a Bank and used to store and quickly interact with the amount of money of each of their customers. Then, when a bank customer will try to withdraw money from an ATM, the request to know if the customer has enough money must be fast and will then be optimized and retrieved by DB2.

Many features are available, and as said previously it depends on the type, version of Db2. If you use Db2 column-store on LUW it will be different than Db2 row-store on z/OS, and each will be optimized.

You can easily connect to Db2 using different applications like Jupyter notebook, Python, C++, bash, Java and nearly every languages mainly used.

Link to official Db2 website : https://www.ibm.com/analytics/db2