Overview of IBM Db2 Warehouse

Db2 Warehouse is an analytics data warehouse that gives you a high level of control over your data and applications, but it is simple to deploy and manage. It offers in-memory BLU processing technology and in-database analytics, provides scalability and performance through its MPP architecture, and is highly compatible with Oracle and Netezza®.

Db2 Warehouse might be a suitable option if any of the following criteria apply to you:
  • Your data must stay on premises because of privacy requirements.
  • You want the flexibility of the cloud without giving up control over your data.
  • You have workloads to move between a public cloud or appliance and a private cloud.
  • You are considering a hybrid architecture to modernize your data warehouse.
  • You want to use a private cloud as a first step to public cloud deployment.

You can deploy Db2 Warehouse in a wide range of environments, from a basic laptop for development purposes, all the way to a large production cluster. You can choose either a single-node (SMP) deployment or a multinode (MPP) deployment. (On Windows and Mac, only SMP deployments are supported.) An MPP deployment has a minimum of three nodes and a maximum of either 24 or 60 nodes. The maximum depends on the number of data partitions that were allocated when you deployed. For more information about the maximum number of nodes, see the "Hardware prerequisites" section of IBM Db2 Warehouse prerequisites.

The containerization technology that Db2 Warehouse uses makes deployment fast and simple. Deployment typically requires fewer than 30 minutes for an MPP cluster and significantly less for SMP. Usually, only one or two commands are required to download and initialize the image. As you can see in Figure 1, the Db2 Warehouse container is lightweight because it doesn’t contain a guest operating system or a hypervisor, as with a VM. The Db2 Warehouse software stack is isolated in its own container, but you can use your existing infrastructure and cloud management or monitoring tools.
Figure 1. Architecture for Db2 Warehouse
Host server, containing infrastructure, file system, operating system, and Db2 Warehouse container
IBM provides the following edition of Db2 Warehouse:
  • Db2 Warehouse Enterprise Edition. This is the warranted edition of Db2 Warehouse. You can use this edition in production environments, and it supports both SMP and MPP deployments. It comes with a 90-day trial license so that you can try before buying.

To get started, see Setting up IBM Db2 Warehouse.