HM Land Registry cuts batch processing time by 99% with IBM DB2 9 for z/OS

HM Land Registry is a United Kingdom government agency that maintains and develops a stable, effective land registration system. The site can assist in guaranteeing title to registered estates and interests in land, and enables confident dealings in property and security by providing immediate access to up-to-date, guaranteed land information.

Challenge
HM Land Registry provides an online portal for creating and maintaining information on land and property ownership across England and Wales. The agency depends on its IBM® System z® mainframes for the availability and security it needs. In addition, the IBM System z hardware provides support for logical partitioning, enables a high degree of scalability through Parallel Sysplex®, DB2® for z/OS Data Sharing and a disk mirroring system that the agency uses to protect property and land data while exploiting it to the very best use. The agency has two IBM System z mainframes housed in separate buildings, and a third located a distance away as a disaster recovery site.

As a public-facing, government organization, HM Land Registry makes it a top priority to maintain high availability and high levels of security and resilience across its business, and within its database and database platforms.

Started as a concept in 2001, HM Land Registry’s E-conveyancing allows site users to be part of a network to share information and conduct transactions securely. Information can be shared electronically, errors and discrepancies are identified and rectified sooner, and electronic deeds and documents can be signed with electronic signatures, leading to faster registration of sales and ownership and earlier protection of land owner interests.

IBM WebSphere® Portal provides the software and portal for the agency’s E-conveyancing initiative. HM Land Registry has about 40 terabytes of production data accessed by internal business unit users, 120,000 registered external users, and the general public. The agency decided to consider upgrading its IBM DB2 for z/OS solution to more fully exploit its data and offer improved service to users. For instance, it needed a better way to support its growing spatial data, such as maps and property boundaries. Additionally, batch jobs that the agency runs each hour were each taking two minutes of CPU time.

Solution
“As a government agency we must maintain availability, but also must be aware that we are spending public money,” notes Maria McCoy, solution coordinator, HM Land Registry. “We want to make sure any expense results in reduced total cost of ownership. A number of features in DB2 9 for z/OS streamline our existing functions and enable new ones, resulting in higher availability and reduced costs.”

“There are quite a few benefits in DB2 9 for z/OS available right out of the box,” notes McCoy, noting she expects to realize benefits from features such as using dynamic pre-fetching in place of sequential pre-fetch. “The sheer stability of the code enabled the smoothest migration we have ever had in the history of HM Land Registry.”

The agency has also seen a huge benefit from using the substring function with index on expression. Its ability to return a substring of a string has impacted those hourly batch jobs that used to take two minutes of CPU time. The same batch jobs now takes less than one second, saving 48 minutes per day of CPU time every day.

“Many businesses and organizations face a decreasing batch window, so having utilities that are more efficient, using less CPU while lowering elapsed time, will really help us move forward in decreasing that batch window while still maintaining the database,” says McCoy.

HM Land Registry also benefits from the improved way in which IBM DB2 9 for z/OS handles XML data.

“We have increasing use of XML in interactions with customers, and with the XML data type capability of DB2 9 for z/OS we can now store that data in the correct format,” says McCoy.

McCoy reports that several other DB2 9 for z/OS features will be particularly useful to HM Land Registry, such as the scalability enhancements around virtual memory usage, and the ability to index on expression which will help a number of staff queries that require functions within the queries.

“The Query Monitor function of DB2 9 for z/OS provides automated alerting that is flexible and highly configurable,” notes McCoy. “Tailoring this alert function will save hours that we would normally spend watching monitors.”

HM Land Registry also depends on IBM Optim™ Solutions to help manage the size and complexity of its database and applications.

“We use Optim Solutions to access, move and compare data on DB2, and now on DB2 9 for z/OS. The Optim tools have been fundamental to our database usage for the last 10 years,” says McCoy, noting that HM Land Registry DBAs, developers and testers all use Optim Solutions.

“IBM solutions are key to the HM Land Registry’s strategic move toward e-services,” says McCoy. “They enable us to offer services online quickly and securely with less staff overhead.”

Benefits
• Supports key online E-conveyancing initiative
• 99% reduction in batch processing time, from two minutes to less than one second
• Streamlined business functions result in higher availability at reduced costs