Database vendors turn to Linux

Developers speak of the critical importance of the database in technical terms: Modern, multi-tiered application architectures rely on relational databases to house the company's collective knowledge and to ensure the durability and persistence of transactions.

Translation: The database is the heart of a business, in that it houses all the information and ensures transactions will be performed reliably and without interruptions.

Relational database management system (RDBMS) makers are always aggressively trying to outshine the competition in expressing their advancements in performance and reliability.

Since the database is a key enterprise application that can make use of Linux benefits in cost, and performance, and reliability, RDBMS vendors are just as aggressively making sure their systems support all that enterprise Linux distributions can offer for performance and reliability.

Companies are looking for databases on Linux platforms and, as the year marches on, expect, too, to see vendors just as eager to brag about how they've extended the Linux advantage to Linux on the POWER family of microprocessors.

Vendor announcements

By December, certainly, it was clear that the major players were serious about including 'Linux on POWER platform' as part of their sales message.

Oracle announced December 17 production-release availability of the Oracle Database 10g Release 1 Client for Power/Linux, capable of running on Linux for POWER processor-based servers in IBM's eServer line: iSeries, pSeries, OpenPower and BladeCenter.

Sybase announced that it's putting its ASE RDBMS on Linux-specific OpenPower processor-based platform. MySQL AB announced in August that it is porting MySQL AB to Linux on POWER5 systems.

64-bit Oracle and 64-bit POWER

The growing trove of ISV applications beginning to show up as POWER-ready for the 64-bit platform has included the Oracle Database-Oracle9idatabase release for POWER built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and capable of running on Linux for the iSeries, pSeries and BladeCenter JS20.

Oracle's map of intentions for Linux on POWER support now includes a later development: In December, Oracle announced plans for production release of its Oracle database 10G (Oracle says that it's the relational database designed for enterprise grid computing) for Linux on POWER.

Oracle announced production-release availability of its Oracle Database 10g Release 1 for Power/Linux. This release was built on Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0, tested with SLES9 (Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9) and can run on the IBM POWER processor-based servers including eServer iSeries, pSeries, OpenPower and BladeCenter-JS20.

DB2 Universal Database and POWER

It's not surprising that the IBM advertising team chose to place a drawing of a penguin happily holding up a pair of heavy barbells to grace the DB2 landing page: The message is not so much in the heavy barbells as the cheerful countenance of a penguin who finds this feat to be a piece of cake.

The message is really brought home in news about what can be achieved when DB2 UDB meets POWER processors. POWER's 64-bit architecture provides DB2 servers with access to vast amounts of memory.

In an interview in August with eServer Magazine, Jeanette Horan, vice president of worldwide data management development and general manager, IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory, notes how Linux scalability in DB2 has been extended with 64-bit Power Architecture support.

She says that enhancing DB2 UDB for Linux on POWER and exploiting the Linux kernels have been important to the continuing evolution of DB2 UDB.

IBM's OpenPower system and Novell's SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES), combined with DB2 Universal Database, set record-breaking benchmark results recently under the rigorous TPC-H benchmark used to assess a database's ability to handle complex BI processing.

This benchmark ranks systems that can examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

One configuration achieved the world record for the best non-clustered result in the TPC-H 100GB benchmark test. Another configuration in a TPC-H benchmark test demonstrated the ability to handle a larger database in clustering the same basic building blocks. The test on a clustered configuration was made up of two OpenPower 720 systems, SLES 9, and DB2 Universal Database v8.2.

As a powerful enterprise database, DB2's bragging rights include the fact that DB2 was the first database for Linux on OpenPower, the Linux-optimized servers announced earlier this year. These are uniquely cost-effective servers, with one or two POWER5 chip modules, depending on the configuration.