Difference between DB2 and Oracle

Basic difference between DB2 and Oracle:

·         Db2 require more memory

·         Oracle is twice as expensive as DB2

Hardware requirements

DB2 v8.1 256 MB RAM Minimum, 100 MB Hard Drive space Min

Oracle 9i 128 MB RAM Minimum, 140 MB Hard Drive space Min

Price

Oracle $15,000 Standard Edition, $40,000 Enterprise Edition
DB2 $ 7,500 Standard Edition, $25,000 Enterprise Edition

SQL

Oracle Function-based indexes, Domain indexes
DB2 Block indexes, Dimension block indexes

Limitation

Parameter	DB2	Oracle
Name Length	128	30
Maximum Column in Index key	16	32
Maximum No of column	1012	255
Longest Index Key	1024	3155
Max table row length	32677	255000
Longest SQL statement	65535	16777216
Recursive sub queries	28	64
Constant string size in Select	32672	4000

Compression rate

DB2 offers Hardware based compression, for compression DB2 uses one compression dictionary for the entire database table, but oracle database uses a separate compression dictionary for each block in the database. (A block is a unit of storage; its size varies from 4K to 32K). DB2 compress substrings that span multiple columns; but oracle database can not compress the substring. DB2 compression dictionary is at table partition level. So if I have large data and it is partitioned by department; then DB2 compress this data with separate compression dictionary to each department.

 Assuming 62 percent compression with DB2, we required 3.8 TB capacity for a 10 TB Data Warehouse versus 7.3 TB with Oracle running at 27 percent compression.  

DB2 UDB

Life in today’s world mainly considers cost cutting measure on many factors to get better economy. The amount of data being collected and its usage keep on increasing day by day. All this data is a valuable resource in a hypercompetitive global environment. Information on demand enables quick, accurate, well-informed business decisions and drives operational efficiency.  But this huge volume of data must be shrewdly managed, analyzed, delivered and archived in all business environments.  Today public and private enterprises throughout the world mainly considering the data intensive applications and services demand high-performance, cost-effective support systems.

All these information driven demands with the need for a robust, dependable and flexible data structure can be balanced by IBM DB2 UDB. It has many features like scalable, reliable data base platform that offers high performs for mixed workloads on various distributed systems. With the combination of DB2 with its tool enables the internal/external user to access the data in very reliable and rapid manner with high secure.

In DB2 we can reduce our total administration and maintenance cost of database to 1/3 rd. IBM DB2 3 times faster than oracle database system, so oracle uses 9 times the number of CPU core to produce 3 times the performance given by DB2.One of the real-time proof is Reliance; they reduced their database cost by implementing DB2 system for their application. 

Data Management

DB2 relief the database administrator to keep on focusing over value adding activities by automates many tasks. Generally the cost of database administration is greater than cost software and hardware which are using for database. DB2 automates many tasks to lower the cost of data management and also increase the efficiency and reliability by deploying virtual appliances. The self tuning memory feature of DB2 reacts to significant changes based on the workload by dynamically distributing the available memory to required memory consumers. And its automatic maintenance capability takes back up of database, current statistics and re-organization of table, index etc., Health maintenance feature of DB2 allows the user to set the threshold limit on database environment, so whenever there is a degradation of database performs happen, it automatically notify the user about poor performance by alarms.

DB2 compress our data almost for 80% so that it will reduce the storage space on the disk as well as storage cost. As we all know disk storage system is very expensive, so small reduction of storage space, will lead to overall cost of storage cost. IBM DB2 pure scale offers clustering technology that helps high availability and scalability in most of the online transaction processing (OLTP).With this feature we can run application written for other database software with mere or no changes; DB2 offers commonly used syntax and PL/SQL procedural language; so we can easily move our data from oracle database to DB2 database.

Administration Cost

Nowadays the biggest thing which is considered by all IT industry is administration cost. Even a small reduction in administration cost will result in massive savings. DB2 provides the savings in administration cost by monitoring and optimizing the superior performance without any human meddling. Its self optimization feature enables the system to react according to the workload to adjust memory and system performance. And also it automatically solves wide range of problem on or before they arise.

Storage Cost

With the help of DB2 system, we can reduce our data storage cost almost to 80% without any performance disgrace. Backup and recovery of database are often not considered seriously until vital data is lost. For all production system it’s very essential to take the backup of all data at certain interval. DB2 also takes the back up of stored data at particular interval. Since all the data stored by DB2 system and back up data will be compressed, it will reduce the time for backup and recovery operations. Compressing of data not only reducing the cost of storage and also it will reduce the storage related I/O cost, infrastructure.

Server Cost

Server cost is the main thing which is related to database performance. We can get better performance and less expensive; whenever our DB2 outplay another database product. DB2 has sophisticated workload management capabilities that help us to get optimized performance. And also it will support more virtualization and cloud computing options too.DB2 database is also available for every operating system like Windows, Unix and Linux.

Shift to DB2

DB2 reduces the cost and risk associated with the database migration. Moving to Db2 could be a matter of days or weeks. It will need only few code changes to run the application on database products. DB2 gives support for syntax, packages, data type, scripting language and concurrency models of other database vendors. Most of the development and maintenance tools support the new migration features.