Vision Juices IBM i Performance in DB Replication Tool

March 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

The latest release of Vision Solutions‘ Double-Take Share database replication tool will yield higher throughput when replicating changes from DB2 for i databases. According to Vision, IBM i shops running Double-Take Share version 5.1 will see performance increases of up to 30 percent. Additional enhancements for IBM i are targeted at high transaction environments.

Double-Take Share (formerly MIMIX Replicate1) is a cross-platform database replication tool designed to move large amounts of data from one database to another in real time. The product is often used in business intelligence environments, where it moves data from production machines to a data warehouse. But it also gets the call during server upgrades and migrations.

With version 5.1, Vision Solutions has made several improvements to how the tool runs in IBM i, z/OS, Microsoft SQL Server, and Teradata environments.

On the IBM i front, Vision squeezed more performance from the tool by streamlining the way Double-Take Share harvests change data from journal receivers. According to Vision, the enhancement allows “more transactions to be replicated with lower system resource utilization,” and has resulted in significant performance gains. Actual results vary on the type and proportion of the data being replicated, but some customers participating in Vision’s first customer ship program saw performance increases of up to 30 percent.

The other IBM i-related performance enhancement, support for *MAXOPT3, allowed Vision to expand the size of journal receivers. When Double-Take Share only supported *MAXOPT2, the receiver size was limited to 10 digits. This posed a problem for high volume environments, and required customers to reset the journal receivers when the sequence approached 100 million.

Now that Vision has expanded the journals to support *MAXOPT3, the sequence number can go out to 20 digits, which dramatically reduce the frequency with which the journal receivers must be reset and reduces the maintenance burden of IT staff.

Other enhancements in Double-Take Share 5.1 include support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 as both a source and target database. Vision also says that replication of XML data is also supported in SQL Server, but only if both source and target are SQL Servers, although they can be different versions of SQL Server. Vision also bolstered support for multiple “metabases” in SQL Server, which “provides additional flexibility for organizations employing multiple data models.”

Vision also bolstered the replication performance in Teradata environments, and also introduced support for IBM z/OS 1.12 and z/OS 1.13.

In addition to the platforms mentioned above, Double-Take Share supports Oracle 11g, IBM DB2 for LUW (Linux, Unix, and Windows), IBM Informix, Sybase ASE, and Microsoft Azure cloud databases.

Vision ships more than 60 pre-packaged data transformations with the software, including processes to change date formats or translate between the EBCDIC character sets used by IBM i and z/OS mainframe environments, and ASCII, which is used everywhere else. For more info, see www.visionsolutions.com.