Demonstrating near real-time analytics with IBM DB2 analytics accelerator

Abstract

Version 3 of the IBM1 DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) takes a major step towards the vision of a universal relational DBMS that transparently processes both, OLTP and analytical-type queries in a single system. Based on heuristics in DB2 for z/OS, the DB2 optimizer decides if a query should be executed by ”mainline” DB2 or if it is beneficial to forward it to the attached IBM DB2 Analytics Optimizer that operates on copies of the DB2 tables. The new ”incremental update” functionality keeps these copy tables in sync by employing replication technology that monitors the DB2 transaction log and asynchronously applies the changes in micro-batches to IDAA. This enables near real-time analytics over online data, effectively marrying traditionally separated OLTP and data warehouse environments. With IDAA, reports can access data that is constantly refreshed in contrast to traditional warehouses that are updated on a daily or even weekly basis. Without any changes to the applications and without the need to introduce cross-system ETL flows, an existing OLTP environment can be used for reporting purposes as well. In this demo, we present a near realtime reporting application modeled on an industry benchmark (TPC-DS), but with a constantly changing set of tables with over 800 million rows that is running on DB2 for z/OS. In a browser-based user interface, demo attendants can influence the rate of changes to the tables and observe how the reporting queries are capturing new data as it is being modified by a separately running OLTP workload generator.