Best Practices for SAP BI using DB2 9 for z/OS - IBM Redbooks

This very powerful combination of technologies provides an integrated
environment capable of handling business intelligence today, and far into the
future. This server infrastructure, coupled with DS8300 storage systems, proved
to be a very resilient and highly available configuration over the course of the
project. There were no hardware failures during the six months of this project.
During this project large volumes of customer and benchmark InfoCube data
were loaded into DB2. The InfoCube data in DB2 was then indexed and stored in
the BI Accelerator for fast query processing. All queries were directed to the BI
Accelerator since the focus of the project was to test the scalability of the BI
Accelerator. As with other database servers, some complex ad hoc queries
directed to DB2 would require creation of aggregates for fast query response
time. The beauty of BI Accelerator is that aggregates are not required.
The scale of our test environment was several magnitudes larger than the largest
BI Accelerator blade configuration size (28 blades) previously tested. We chose
to test three database sizes: 5 terabytes (TB), 15 TB, and 25 TB. Our project
demonstrated that the SAP BI Accelerator on IBM blades can deliver very fast
execution for a wide variety of complex queries with consistent response times.
This was achieved using a highly compressed BI Accelerator index data
structure and efficient parallel in-memory query processing.
11.2 Jupiter environment infrastructure
This section describes the Jupiter environment infrastructure that we built at the
IBM System z Benchmark Center at Poughkeepsie, New York. It includes our:
► Hardware and software configuration
► Network infrastructure
By design, some hardware components in this environment were oversized,
because we did not have all the information required for capacity planning at the
beginning of the project. This large configuration was designed to ensure that
there would be no resource constraints during any of the scalability tests.
Chapter 11. Project Jupiter: large BI Accelerator scalability evaluation 229