Autonomics
The cost of database administration can greatly exceed the cost of the database software and hardware so it's critical that IT staff time be used effectively and efficiently. DB2 includes numerous autonomic features, such as the Self-Tuning Memory Manager, that free IT staff from many administration tasks. As a result, IT staff can spend less time administering the system and more time focusing on other activities that benefit the business.
Storage optimization
Businesses with large volumes of data know how expensive data storage can be. DB2 can dramatically reduce that cost with industry leading data compression technologies that compress tables, indexes, archive logs, temporary space, LOBs, XML, and back-up data. Adaptive data compression applies multiple compression techniques, including both table-wide and page-level compression, for maximum impact.
Moreover, because compression allows DB2 to keep more and data in memory, thereby avoiding performance-robbing disk I/O, database performance can increase. When you combine this Deep Compression with the Multi-Temperature Data Management, DB2 provides you with the ideal combination of features for optimizing and allocating your data storage environment.
Performance
DB2 has dominated key performance benchmarks over the years, including both On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) benchmarks. This world class performance means that businesses can do more work with their existing hardware, thereby avoiding or delaying costly server upgrades.
Scalability
DB2 pureScale uses a cluster-based, shared-disk architecture to offer easy scalability and high availability. DB2 pureScale avoids many of the drawbacks of cluster solutions from other vendors, including the “cluster overhead” that limits their ability to scale beyond a few nodes. In addition, other solutions take minutes to resume processing after node failure, while DB2 pureScale continues to operate without performance degradation. Adding servers to other solutions can require complex tuning and updates to application code, while DB2 pureScale scales without needing to tune the system and requires minimal changes to application code.
Security
Unauthorized data access is an ever present threat that can end up costing business considerable sums of money, their reputation, or both. DB2 offers a comprehensive suite of security features that effectively and decisively minimize this threat, including access control for rows, columns and IT staff roles. DB2 provides additional peace of mind with lightweight security audit mechanism that can be used to verify that there has been no unauthorized data access.
Reliability
For many businesses, database downtime equals both money and opportunity lost. DB2 can minimize the downtime associated with many planned activities and unplanned events by either eliminating the downtime completely or reducing it's duration to a few seconds.
SQL Compatibility
With DB2, IBM has significantly reduced reduce the risk and cost associated with database migration. Applications built to run on comparable Oracle databases require few or no code changes to run on DB2, which make data server consolidation much easier and further reduce operational costs.
pureXML
With the native XML data support provided by DB2, you can enjoy breakthrough performance, minimize your data storage requirements, and benefit from IT staff productivity enhancements.
Time Travel Query
Industry regulations and competitive pressures are prompting IT managers to maintain more data for longer periods of time and to provide better ways for business users to analyze past, current, and future events. To help organizations achieve these goals, IBM has built bi-temporal capabilities directly into the database.
Developer support
Businesses can't afford to have their application development teams struggling with inappropriate syntax and APIs. That’s why DB2 offers multiple query languages, including SQL, XQuery, SPARQL. DB2 even supports certain other vendor’s flavors of SQL, making it easy for developers to work with DB2. DB2 also supports APIs like JDBC, ODBC and .NET. In addition, developer-friendly features like Time Travel Query make it easy to take advantages of the native bi-temporal features in DB2.
Comprehensive Tools
Good database tools make expensive DBA, Application Developer, and other human resources more productive. Moreover, good tools can help someone with average database skills accomplish the results of an expert. Complementing the tools included with DB2 is a broad range of IBM data management tools to help with all aspects of the data management life cycle.
Virtualization
For businesses with multiple database servers not using full hardware capacity, the cost-saving benefits of virtualization are clear: server consolidation, space savings, reduced power and cooling. DB2 lets businesses enjoy these savings with flexible licensing terms that allow all aspects of DB2 to be deployed in a virtualized environment.