The IBM i Future: Hints from DB2

The IBM i Future: Hints from DB2

April 13, 2015

In a previous post about the future of IBM i, I shared some of the primary messages we give to customers who ask us things like, “Show me a roadmap for IBM i for the next five years” and “Is IBM going to support IBM i in the future?” Typically, these questions get asked by CxO types in companies—CTOs, CIOs and CEOs who don’t have much experience with IBM i and its predecessors, or who have been depending on the platform for a long time, but who have had no reason to pay close attention to the blogs, whitepapers and conference sessions we’ve been creating for the customer base. The messages from that post are often enough to calm the anxiety of CxOs, particularly if we get to deliver them in person.

 

However, there is more than one approach to demonstrating IBM’s strategic commitment to the IBM i and its customer base, so today I’m going to take another of those approaches, and this approach might be more meaningful to people who have more specific technical knowledge than is typically required of a day-to-day CxO. What is it?

 

Look at the recent past. Specifically, look at the investments IBM i development is making in technological enhancements, and ask yourself whether these investments give you an indication where the platform is headed. Today, I’ll talk about just one area of IBM i, but it’s an important area, since it’s the core of the operating system: DB2.

 

DB2 and the Data-centric paradigm: For several years, we’ve been talking about the benefits of a “data-centric” approach for application design. In case you’re not familiar with it, “data-centric” means that you define, in the database, how your data should be treated, so that you don’t have to ensure every application and management method you have for the data is synchronized properly. Hmmm. Maybe that’s not clear enough. Let me give you examples.

 

In IBM i 7.1, we made it possible to do column-level encryption, defined at the DB2 column level. By doing this, we ensured you could enforce a security policy that required specific information was always encrypted, without having to go into every piece of code, and knowing that every interface into your DB would be protected. This is data-centric encryption. Similarly, in IBM i 7.2 we introduced Row/Column Access Control, which is also data-centric. It gets defined for the entire database, no matter how the data is accessed. And when 7.2 TR2 and 7.1 TR10 get announced, there’s another DB2 feature that allows more data-centric management, reducing the complexity of managing your DB2, by having DB2 do things for you.

In each of these instances, we’re guiding the solution community toward a data-centric approach, because ultimately it makes it easier for customers, and it provides more opportunity for us to optimize DB2 for our customers. We see a future where people will use DB2 more and more, as they have in the past, but they will want to avoid complex and error-prone methods of securing, managing and designing their database. And we’re investing in that future.

 

First on DB2 for i: Furthermore, some of the features we’re putting into DB2 for i are features that other members of the DB2 family will get, but they don’t have them yet. Regular expression support from TR1/TR9 was one example where the IBM i DB2 implementation was the first DB2 to support it, and the feature I hinted at above is another example of a DB2 feature that will be delivered on IBM i first. So, IBM i is not just investing, it’s remaining a full partner with other DB2 family members, doing functions that support the future of database use before anyone else.

 

Integration of XML: XML, of course, is a way to describe data. DB2 stores data. XML is a big deal. DB2 is big deal. Of course, if you’re an operating system like IBM i, built around DB2, and you want to enable yourself for the future, you figure out how you’re going to work with XML, or not. In the context of investing for the future, realize that we had a choice. We could have allowed XML support to remain a job for application developers. Integrating the support into DB2 would provide significant value to developers, and it would support that “data-centric” strategy I mentioned before, but it also would mean we were committing to supporting a pretty extensive data description technology well into the future. So what did IBM i decide to do?

 

At first, the IBM i DB2 first added support to store and use XML in a very general way. Then, more than five years ago, over the course of several mid-release deliverables and a major release, DB2 on i incorporated advanced XML support integrated directly into the database. It was one of the major enhancements in 7.1, and has been extended several times since then.

 

XML is still necessary, of course. Plenty of people use it. But these days, it’s not the only “big deal” in data description. XML is powerful, but pretty complicated when comparing it to at least one other popular technology. (Do I hear someone in the audience asking about JSON? Yes, I thought I did.) So, what are we going to do? Hmmmm. I guess we could do nothing. If IBM i didn’t have a future, doing nothing would probably be best. Why tie ourselves to another growing new data-related technology if we can’t continue to support it? On the other hand, since IBM i does have a future—well, you can expect more news in this area.

More: Other aspects of DB2 show continued investment, for the future of our customers, but those aspects might cross over into other future blogs, so let me just say that Services through SQL has been a focus of IBM i for quite some time (Dawn May wrote about it here: http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Blogs/i-Can/March-2015/IBM-i-Services/ ) and then there is all the support we have created to help users Modernize the use of DB2, which is covered extensively in the IBM i Modernization Redbook.

 

In closing (for today—not forever) let me reiterate: there are many ways to talk about the future of IBM i and each of those ways might be more effective to certain groups of people. If you are a technical person and you are asked by your executive if IBM is saying anything about the future of IBM i, then I suggest you point them to the previous blog and the resources it mentions.

 

On the other hand, if you are a technical person and you get the same question from another technical person, information about the technical investments being made in IBM i might serve you better. And if DB2 isn’t the right technology to talk about, well, then you can wait for me to write about other parts of IBM i. Or, better yet, think about the new things you’ve seen us announce over the past few years and develop a list of things that means the most to you. Because when you’re face-to-face with a doubter, the best position you can take is one that you believe in, and you do that best with facts that mean something to you.

 

Until next time, I’ll keep heading into the future. I look forward to seeing you there!

 

Posted April 13, 2015 | Permalink