This report has the target to clarify the performance differences between the Oracle and IBM DB2 software. The whole purpose behind this report is to provide its reader with a one-on-one comparison of the two products aka Oracle and IBM D2 exploring many of their database administrative functions.
Oracle, a very famous American multinational corporation that specializes in making computer technology related products, is put up against IBM, which is also excelling in its area of computer technology. Their products Oracle 11g and IBM DB2 are put through same quality tests and their performances were closely observed.
Oracle database is known as the collection of data where the data is treated as a unit and the purpose of this database is to store the useful data and retrieve the selected data according the demands of user. This huge amount of data is very reliably stored in server that is capable of managing it efficiently in a multiuser environment. The Oracle database is able to store all this information and still show high levels of performance by adding security to the whole data. It is designed to handle enterprise computing and is very flexible and cost effective.
IMB DB2 on the other hand is the ‘relational database management system’ and is very effective software for data management. It can be efficiently useful in managing the data about the experimentation results and purchase records. Its strongest suit is the effective handing data so that it can be stored, secured and manipulated in a very secure and safe manner.
Related Works
A lot of remarkable work is done and is being done to compare these two products point out which product is better than which in what prospective. For this numerous researcher have compared important qualities of each of the software after putting them through tests in similar environments and carefully evaluated the results.
[1Steve Mintz, Janauary 2009] A very effective test regarding this report was done by Edison Group where they set up a very suitable lab environment to observe the collection of customary RDBMS administrative tasks and that were then used to measure the management efficiency of both the products. The company used the Oracle 11g version and put it up against IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5.
These tests and experiments were also then used to measure the complexity of both the products. The results were compiled to according to the responses of these softwares in a controlled development which was then used to judge how easy they are to use in the business world and how manageable they are in real world.
The group divided the Workload test into categories which included:
1. Recovery and Backup
2. Day to day data base administration
3. Performance diagnostics
4. Setup and configuration
These four work areas were given proper and carefully evaluated weightings and are then used to measure important performance factors such as time and complexity of both systems.
What Edison group concluded from this test was that:
Oracle Database 11g allowed the DBAs to work as fast as 40 percent more than when they were working with IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5
Oracle was proved to be easier to use as it required 49 % less steps from the total steps required by IBM DB2.
[3] Apart from that Triton Consulting also conducted a series of experiments to check the complexity of Oracle and DB2 and in their experimentation they used the Oracle 11gR2 version and they compared it with DB2 9.7. These tests and examinations used the following mentioned activities to measure the complexity of both the products.
1. Installation
2. Enabling the compression of table
3. Enabling the compression of index
4. Recovery and backup
5. Automatic tuning of the memory
6. Control on Data Access
[2] Another technical comparison between these two software another group has used a higher version of both the software aka for Oracle they used the Oracle Database 12c and compared it with IBM DB2 10.2. They have used this comparison to show the high availability and what they concluded from their close and careful examination is that Oracle is more suitable option for running the high availability and critical enterprise applications for the major and fortune companies. They concluded from their research that Oracle promises a well-integrated high availability stack of solution but some compromised components include RAC, ASM and Data Guard and few other things and in comparison this IMB DB2 has a basic set of high availability that means that it lacks certain features and thus does not obtain the level of completeness that Oracle has. It lack many of the function that many modern day business need.
[4 ] Indexes are database structures that are created to provide faster access to data , using Indexes can reduce the input output operations , thus increasing the power of data retrieval. Oracle and DB2 both support B-tree indexing schemes. Oracle provides many additional indexing techniques. Particularly, oracle supports static bitmap indexes and bitmap join indexes which benefit data warehousing applications. Additionally, Oracle supports global indexes across partitions, which are essential in OLTP environments when using partitioned tables. DB2 supports b-tree indexes and dynamic bitmap indexes. DB2 does not support global indexes across partitions.
[5] Clusters are group of independent servers connected via a private network. The servers/nodes works as a single system. Both Oracle and DB2 provide support for clustered systems but differ greatly in their architecture. Oracle Database Clusters adopts a shared disk approach. In shared disk database architecture, database files are logically shared among the nodes of a loosely coupled system with each instance having access to all the data. Shared disk systems Require careful design and implementation.
DB2 adopts a shared nothing approach. In Shared Nothing systems the database is split up among a number of ‘partitions’ running on the nodes of a multi-computer systems. a pure shared nothing system is similar to a distributed database. A transaction executing on a node must send messages to other nodes. It also coordinate the work done on the other nodes to perform the required activities. Such messaging is commonly known as ‘function shipping’. However, shared nothing databases are different from distributed databases.
[6] The system security is effective and strong only when the systems is empowered with the strong user screening process and methods. It was rightly observed that the DB2 is fully equipped with authentication and authorization processes that give it a strong security base. This is ensured by making sure that the proper information is acquired about the administration before installation. Each user is given a unique and a corresponding password.
Whereas if Oracle is put under question, it is able to provide various kinds of user authentication methods which include host based(by the corresponding OS), oracle based(by the help of digital credentials with industrial standards or the passwords) and third party based(which basically include the authentication services of network). It ensures the adequate complexity of passwords and is equipped with the built in system whole sole responsibility is to manage passwords.
DB2 makes sure that the RACF is fully utilized to make it certain that the proper access control is implemented in the mainframe environment. The presence of RACF is important because without it the administrators are not able to have the secure all the instances of DB2 adequately. On the contrary the RACF is a mere extension to the security of the Oracle database.
The facility of network encryption is not provided in the DB2 database due to which the establishment of secure connections between the database and its clients does not happen. Since this feature is not present in the system the customers have to purchase them separately add security and encryption layers.
When you compare all this to Oracle it can be seen that the Oracle has an advanced system of security which is sure to provide security and safety to the Oracle Database. It has the huge range pf encryption methods and protocols for safe communication of database.
[8 Youssef Bassil, 2012] According to some tests and observances to compare the execution time of both the DBMS it was concluded that the DB2 is faster when compared to Oracle. Some very basic yet different types of commands were run on both the DBMS and it was observed that the execution speed of DB2 was greater than the Oracle by about 200 units. It was only the query of nested Selects that slowed the DB2 down but on the other queries Oracle’s speed was below DB2’s.
[7Lavanya Pamulaparty, 2013] Partitioning is the method of dividing the tables and other database structures into smaller pieces so that they become more manageable. Partitioning enables partitioning pruning which limits the application of required operations on the part of data that are actually needed. It is a very remarkable technique because it reduces the data that has to be processed and thus increases the processing speed. Oracle has taken the lead in this department as it provides several kinds of partitioning techniques such as Range Partitioning, List Partitioning, Hash Partitioning, Composite Partitioning and Local Index. On the other hand the DB2 DBMS is not so rich in this area as it provides only the Hash Partitioning and Local Index.
[9Bad Homburg, November 2004] Speaking of the availability of the DBMS it was observed that the on IBM’s pSeries platform the number of DB2 outages were half the number of outages of Oracle and also it was evaluated that the duration of outages of DB2 was 10% to that of Oracle.
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[11]Autonomicity is a very important feature in a DBMS and in DB2 it is taken care of by LEO whereas Optimizer is what brings autonomicity in the Oracle. The automatic collection of data is the responsibility of ASC in DB2 which is not same as that of Oracle which uses the ASC component. This intelligence is through different tools aka ADDM (automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor) for Oracle and the PE for DB2. the parallelism in Oracle is responsible for reorganization of tables, index rebuilding and execution of various queries whereas in the case of DB2 it is the in charge of taking care of input and output of query and CPU. The further analysis of both the DBMS revealed that the DB2 is able to perform more tasks and automatically but there are still some features that has to mended to reach a more satisfactory level of perfection.
[12]There are several limitations to the Oracle regarding the automation which includes that the complete automation of whole of the process of Oracle is not actually possible when it comes to non-regression testing under reliability and reasonable cost.
References
[1] Steve Mintz ‘Comparative Management Cost Study, Oracle Database 11g vs. IBM DB2 ?? Enterprise 9.5’, January 2009, pp 1-10
[2] Oracle HA Product Management, ‘Technical Comparison Oracle Database 12c vs IBM DB2 10.2:Focus on High Availability’, October 2013
[3] Triton Consulting, ‘Comparing DBA Productivity: An Oracle/DB2 Task Complexity Analysis’, November 2010, pp 2-4
[4]An Oracle White Paper ,May 2005
[5]An Oracle White Paper ,May 2005
[6]A Survey: Security Perspectives of ORACLE and IBM-DB2 Databases by Lavanya Pamulaparty, T. Praveen Kumar, P. Vijaya Babu Varma
[7] Lavanya Pamulaparty, ‘A Comparative Study on Oracle and IBMDB2 Databases’, UACEE International Journal of Computer Science and its Applications, Vol. 3, Issue 1, Pages 32-37, 2013
[8] Youssef Bassil, ‘ A Comparative Study on the Performance of the Top DBMS Systems’, Journal of Computer Science & Research (JCSCR), Vol. 1, No. 1, Pages. 20-31, February 2012
[9] Bad Homburg, ‘IBM DB2 UDB V8.2?? Oracle10g?? Microsoft SQL Server 2000?? A technical comparison’, November 2004
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[11] Abdul Mateen, AUTONOMICITY IN UNIVERSAL DATABASE DB2, Computer and Information Science, pages 445 ‘ 450, June 2009,
[12] Seyed Reza Shahamiri, A Comparative Study on Automated Software Test Oracle Methods,Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances, 2009
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