Precisely Streams IBM i Data Into Amazon’s New Db2 Service
April 8, 2024 Alex Woodie
Amid the torrent of news that Amazon Web Services unveiled at its re:Invent show four months ago was RDS for Db2, a new hosted relational data service based on IBM’s database. Amazon Web Services offers the Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) variant of Db2, but thanks to a new connector unveiled by Precisely last week, IBM i and mainframe shops have a way to replicate their data into it.
Amazon RDS is among the cloud giant’s most popular services, and likely one of the most popular IT services ever created. According to one estimate, Amazon RDS brings in $7 billion in revenue per year in a market that Gartner estimates is worth $100 billion per year. (Amazon Aurora, the serverless version of RDS, brings in another $4 billion.)
AWS originally launched Amazon RDS back in 2009 with support for the MySQL database. Over the years, the cloud giant has added support for additional database “engines” in Amazon RDS, including Oracle (2011), SQL Server (2012), Postgres (2014), and MariaDB (2015).
While it is doubtful that the new Db2 flavor of Amazon RDS will approach the level of adoption of Postgres or MySQL anytime soon, it likely will gain traction among IBM customers that want an easier way to move their existing applications to the cloud. AWS launched its managed Db2 offering with the blessing and participation of IBM. Dinesh Nirmal, the senior vice president of products at IBM Software, even said in a press release that “IBM and AWS are redefining the possibilities of cloud database innovation.”
Precisely is also hoping to get into the Amazon RDS for Db2 game. Last week, the company (formerly known as Vision Solutions) announced that it’s now supporting Amazon RDS for Db2 with Precisely Connect, its real-time data integration offering.
Precisely Connect uses a combination of different techniques to move data from source systems to target systems. It uses extract, transforms, and load (ETL) methods to move batches of data when time isn’t a critical factor, such as moving the previous 24 hours’ worth of transactions to a centralized data warehouse at the end of the day.
When time and data freshness are critical factors, Precisely Connect can employ change data capture (CDC) techniques to get access to data directly from Db2 as soon as it’s committed to the database’s write-ahead log (or the local journal, in the case of Db2 for i). This is a form of data streaming that allows companies to use the very latest transactions to power downstream applications.
There are a couple of use cases that Precisely has in mind for this offering. There are analytics applications that can be enabled by moving data in real-time from on-prem Db2 for i and Db2 for z/OS systems into Amazon RDS. Analytics and AI are processor and sometimes memory bandwidth intensive, and running these workloads in the cloud allows users to scale up their Amazon EC2 usage when needed, and then scale it back down when done.
There is also a migration angle. While IBM i and mainframe shops would like to think that their applications are never going to leave on-prem data centers and move to the cloud, the reality is that many companies are trying to figure out how to do exactly that. Having a cloudy version of Db2 that somebody else is feeding and taking care for checks one more box for CIOs who have been tasked with moving their IT estates into the cloud.
“Digital transformation and IT infrastructure modernization initiatives look different for every company, but the one common denominator across all industries is the need for fast and reliable access to trusted data,” Precisely chief operating officer Eric Yau said in a statement. “Our work and expertise with AWS allow us to support customers with the flexibility and agility needed to align real-time data delivery with changing business demands.”
Precisely’s support for Amazon RDS comes on the heels of its December announcement that AWS is reselling Connect. That reseller agreement was made possible after Connect was awarded the Amazon RDS Ready Product badge as a component of Precisely’s participation in the AWS Partner Network.
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