Author Description

As business cycles speed up, many customers gain significant competitive advantage from quicker and more accurate business decision-making by using real data. For many customers, choosing the path to co-locate their transactional and analytical workloads on System z® better leverages their existing investment in hardware, software, and skills. We created a project to address a number of best practice questions on how to manage these newer, analytical type workloads, especially when co-located with traditional transactional workloads. The goal of this IBM® Redbooks® publication is to provide technical guidance and performance trade-offs associated with resource management and potentially DB2® data-sharing in a variety of mixed transactional / data warehouse System z topologies. The term co-location used here and in the rest of the book is specifically defined as the practice of housing both transactional (OLTP) and data warehouse (analytical) workloads within the same System z configuration. We also assumed that key portions of the transactional and data warehouse databases would reside on DB2 for z/OS®. The databases may or may not reside in a DB2 data-sharing environment; we discuss those pros and cons in this book. The intended audience includes DB2 data warehouse architects and practitioners who are facing choices in resource management and system topologies in the data warehouse arena. This specifically includes Business Intelligence (BI) administrators, DB2 database administrators (DBAs) and z/OS performance administrators / systems programmers. In addition, decision makers and architects can utilize this book to assist in making platform and database topology decisions. The book is divided into four parts. Part I, "Introducing the co-location project" covers the System z value proposition and why one should consider System z as the central platform for their data warehousing / business analytics needs. Some topics are risk avoidance