Large DB2 data warehouses on Linux (and AIX)
I was consulting recently to a client that needs to build really big relational data warehouses, and also is attracted to native XML. Naturally, I suggested they consider DB2. They immediately shot back that they were Linux-based, and didn’t think DB2 ran (or ran well) on Linux. Since IBM often leads with AIX-based offerings in its marketing and customer success stories, that wasn’t a ridiculous opinion. On the other hand, it also was very far from what I believed.
So I fired some questions at IBM, who immediately assured me that DB2 has indeed run on Linux since 1999. What’s more, there are Balanced Warehouse choices (the successor to Balanced Configuration Units) running on Linux, although the biggest Linux-based BCU* is the E6000, which at one terabyte is half the size of the biggest AIX ones (E7000 and E7050).
*IBM told me that the Balanced Warehouse had replaced BCUs. Then they sent me a chart in which the products in the new category were identified as BCUs. Go figure. IBM with confusing product naming — who woulda thunk it??
From there, I asked the followup question: How big do DB2 data warehouses get, on each of Linux and AIX? I stipulated that these should be warehouses created without any painful unnatural acts. The numbers I got back were 50-75 TB for the biggest Linux installations, and 125-175 for the biggest “p-series” ones, which I presume means AIX.
Oracle certainly has warehouses of similar size to those, but I think inspection would show that their creation was unnatural and painful indeed.
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