Philip Howard, of The Register, writes: DB2 'Stinger' to pack powerful punch.
Philip states that there are far too many features of IBM's DB2 UDB "Stinger" release to enumerate or give fair coverage to at this time or in this article. But what Philip does talk a bit about is the new "Autonomic" features of "Stinger" and I provide this excerpt below:
...what really stands out for me is the extended DBA (database administrator) capability. In particular, there are two features that are especially impressive: the Design Advisor and the product's Autonomic Management features.
...While DB2's Autonomic Management features cover a range of different areas (which, again, I don't have space to cover) the most interesting is based on IBM's Learning Optimiser (LEO) project (which is ongoing). This provides continuous statistics monitoring and updating for the DB2 optimiser, rather than relying on the DBA to "Runstats" as and when he or she thought fit, which used to be the case.
Now, the obvious advantage of autonomic statistics updating is not only that you take another tedious task away from the DBA but also that the system can learn faster and better about itself and therefore update the optimiser more efficiently. However, there is a potential downside, which is the impact on run-time performance. In order to minimise this, IBM uses a form of query sampling named after one of the Bernouilli family (I don't know which one - there were lots of them in the 17th and 18th centuries - to the extent that they have been described as being to mathematics what the Bach family was to music), which is based on cardinality. What is particularly nice is that query sampling is not only used in gathering statistics, but IBM is also surfacing it as an extension to SQL so that you can use it as a pre-cursor to making more detailed queries for predictive analytics, say...
K-Collector Topics: Autonomic Computing Productivity Statistics Writing IBM