We’re thrilled to introduce the general availability of our next generation, cloud-native Db2 Warehouse on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is a game-changer for organizations looking to optimize costs, improve performance, share data responsibly, and unlock the full potential of their data for analytics and AI. With the next generation of Db2 Warehouse, we’re introducing a host of new capabilities.

What’s new?

1. Cut your analytics costs by up to 34x¹

The next generation of Db2 Warehouse introduces cloud-native support for Db2 column-organized tables residing in cloud object storage (based on Amazon S3). This makes is up to 34x less expensive to store massive quantities of data on a highly scalable, highly available storage tier. Coupled with our 30+ years of engine innovation, Db2 Warehouse is now the no-brainer choice for storing, managing, and querying massive data sets on the cloud.

2. Achieve up to 4x¹ query performance

Better performance without the cost, how? Our advanced caching technology, coupled with data in Object Storage, helps customers improve performance up to 4x¹ compared to the prior generation of Db2 Warehouse. We could not be more excited about the improvements. For details, check out our new performance blog, where we detail out the various improvements we’ve made to the engine.

3. Share data responsibly

Db2 has been a consistent leader in data privacy, protection, and security with strong encryption, data access controls and data masking. With the latest generation of Db2 Warehouse, we’re taking that one step further with support for open data formats that enable collaboration in a whole new way. Db2 Warehouse now gives you the freedom to catalog, ingest and query open data and table formats with support for Iceberg, Parquet, ORC, CSV, and more are on the way.

4. Scale analytics and AI across the enterprise

Db2 Warehouse seamlessly integrates with watsonx.data, our newest data store built on an open lakehouse architecture. For the first time ever, all your data warehouses and data lakes are stitched together to provide you with a singular view of your entire analytics and AI estate. This new architecture allows you to easily augment existing workloads across hybrid cloud and run fit-for-purpose engines that best meet your workload and price-performance needs. Gain new insights from your warehouse data and eliminate data silos by combining data in IBM Db2 Warehouse and IBM watsonx.data.

“We are very excited to see object storage support for table storage and open table & data format,” said Keishi Miura, Data & Analytics Division Technical Software (Database) Sales Manager, NI + C. “Next gen Db2 Warehouse is very powerful for not only existing IIAS customers but also the customers who have been suffering from performance and cost, because we see the improvement for cost-performance for BI use cases. We are also looking forward to integration with watsonx.data for multiple use cases and optimize both performance and cost efficiency.”

There’s even more to Db2 Warehouse

We’re packing even more capability into this major release. These include:

• Fully managed cloud data warehouse – Customers can now scale their Db2 Warehouse instance up to 5760 vCPUs per cluster, significantly extending the scale and scope of their deployments.
• Storage auto-increase for Block Storage – For customers that continue to rely on block storage, the new release provides the ability to set auto-increase thresholds, ensuring you never run out of storage for your workloads
• Granular, schema-level backup/restore – Db2 Warehouse now provides much more comprehensive backup capabilities, including ability to take granular, schema level backups. This allows much more control while designing your backup strategy.
• Integration with IBM AppID – Db2 Warehouse now provides integration with IBM AppID for easy integration with Azure Active Directory
• New APIs – We are launching new APIs for scaling, updates, backup/restore, logging, further simplifying the administration of your Db2 Warehouse SaaS instance

Tying it all together with watsonx.data

Db2 Warehouse and watsonx.data combine to give customers the ability to seamlessly modernize their existing analytics environment, eliminate data silos, and optimize their analytics and AI workloads to suit their cost and performance needs.

1. Modernize the warehouse: Customers looking to upgrade from their existing on-premises Integrated Analytics System (IIAS) or PureData System for Analytics (PDOA) analytics appliance to the cloud can seamlessly transfer data and workloads to Db2 Warehouse SaaS
2. Replicate data from Db2 on Z to Db2 Warehouse with live twinning: Customers looking to share data from Db2 on Z with their Db2 Warehouse & watsonx.data can take advantage of Db2 Live Twinning capability and Db2 Data Gate to replicate their Z data to their cloud environments
3. Cost-optimize cloud data warehouse storage: Cloud object storage and advanced caching gives all customers the ability to cheaply store their data while enjoying up to 4x faster query performance than previous generations.
4. Share warehouse data with the data lake: Customers can share data from their Db2 Warehouse SaaS instance with their watsonx.data instance using the first-party integration capabilities in the product. This allows customers to run fit-for-purpose engines for their workload and get a singular view of their analytics estate.
5. Promote data lake data to the warehouse: watsonx.data customers can promote their curated data into Db2 Warehouse to take advantage of the performance, resiliency, and scalability of the Db2 engine for their always-on workloads.

Demo: Db2 Warehouse next generation on AWS

Watch the demo below to see all the new features in action.

Start your free trial today

Start a Db2 Warehouse free trial and receive $1000 in free credits to test drive a Db2 Warehouse SaaS instance! New to an IBM Cloud account? Sign up today and receive an additional $200 credit upon creating an IBM Cloud account.

¹Running IBM Big Data Insights concurrent query benchmark on two equivalent Db2 Warehouse environments with 24 database partitions on two EC2 nodes, each with 48 cores, 768 GB memory and a 25 Gbps network interface; one environment did not use the caching capability and was used as a baseline. Result: A 4x increase in query speed using the new capability. Storage cost reduction derived from price for cloud object storage, which is priced 34x cheaper than SSD-based block storage. https://www.ibm.com/products/db2/pricing