Indeed, Picciano said, large ISVs (independent software vendors) such as Nextance and Justsystems have shifted to using XML as an internal representation format over the past year or two. "As we've introduced Viper to them, they've said, 'This is exactly what we were hoping somebody would step up and do,'" he said.

If people's interest in XML has flagged, it's not because XML isn't out there; rather, it's the fault of inelegant XML handling databases, Picciano said. "Because today's generation of XML handling databases has been woefully inefficient in handling XML data, many customers have kept it separate," he said. "It's been spread out across disk systems, not centrally managed as a data asset. If you talk to some people in IT, they're unaware of the amount of XML their organizations are using. … But I really have yet to go to a client and talk to them about XML as a data technology and have them say, 'We don't have any need for that.'"

Viper's XML power has gotten all the press. But two other biggies catch the eye of Bloor Research's Howard: new compression technologies, brought with Viper's "Venom" technology, and the fact that Viper is IBM's stake in the ground in the data warehousing space.

He pointed to IBM's Data Warehousing BCU (Balanced Configuration Unit) as being the first positive move to be taken by a data warehousing company in the face of appliance vendors starting to muscle in. "Appliance vendors are starting to get a lot of traction," he said. "It's hurting Teradata, [and] it will hurt Oracle. IBM is the only mainstream vendor taking steps to compete with the likes of DATAllegro … and Netezza."

The appliance companies offer bundled data warehouse appliances that practically eschew administrative costs, Howard said, delivered as preinstalled software on hardware platforms.

To deliver the BCU, IBM took its experience with data warehousing and created a set of best practices, multidimensional clustering, summary tables and more to preinstall DB2 in a data warehousing environment.

It's a turnkey solution, Howard said, and it could help IBM grab market share from its arch competitor, Oracle. "[IBM is trying] to minimize the management overhead," he said. "I don't think that goes the whole way to answer the threat of Netezza, but Oracle hasn't moved at all to compete with [that threat]. IBM is bundling BCU with a hardware platform, [whereas] Oracle doesn't have a hardware platform. This is potentially a threat to Oracle."

Independent analyst and eWEEK contributing columnist Charlie Garry disagreed with Howard, however, saying that the BCU is, in fact, another instance of IBM playing catch-up.

"In the past, IBM simply had not standardized on a subset of hardware and storage for their warehouse implementations with DB2 on Unix/Win/Linux," Garry wrote in an e-mail exchange. "This meant a great deal of configuration on-site and delayed successful implementations of DB2 as a warehouse database. The BCU is simply a way for IBM to sell a bundled set of hardware and software that they have great experience with and can more accurately predict performance for across a range of workloads. This helps to speed up implementations.

IBM is not, in fact, the first vendor to come up with such a solution, Garry said—Teradata got there first, and IBM is, wisely enough, following suit. "Teradata has always operated in this fashion," Garry wrote. "It should be pointed out that Teradata competitors spread FUD about this approach, claiming the proprietary nature of Teradata systems. No one could argue with the fast time to value, however, and the share Teradata has taken over the past five years. Now IBM is doing it and it is a good approach, but it is not in any way an answer to the warehouse appliance vendors. We are not talking about a single piece of hardware containing server, storage, and software that you create tables on and load data. To put it more succinctly, a warehouse appliance could be up and running in a matter of hours after delivery while an IBM BCU or a Teradata system would take much longer. The point is that the BCU is not an answer to the appliance vendors.

"Is certainly not a turn-key solution," Garry wrote. "But then again, no data warehouse is, appliance or not."

The separate XML storage engine is an interesting approach, similar to the modular approach that MySQL has taken with its storage engines. While IBM will attempt to convince customers they need this, it is more likely that this technology is in DB2 to support IBM's own content management and data integration strategy. I see DB2 becoming an increasingly embedded solution for IBM in the future versus a stand-alone database offering.

Many of the features are old relative to most other databases as pointed out in the article. Multidimensional clustering was known as a clustering index back in the day when I supported DB2 on the mainframe. Range partitioning has been in the mainframe version for perhaps 15 years. Now IBM trumpets the combination of those technologies with the hash partitioning they already sold as the data partitioning offering for DB2 on Unix/Win/Linux. These things have improved performance and the reason we know this is because other databases (even DB2 on zSeries) have used them before. The key to success will be in the Design Advisor which helps administrators make physical design decisions after the fact. If those recommendations are good, if they can be implemented without creating a great deal of effort and added expense, then IBM will have something.

Beyond BCU, Viper packs loads of features that are warehouse-friendly, Picciano said. The list includes improved large database management and table partitioning. Table partitioning is a data organization scheme in which table data is divided across multiple storage objects called table partitions or ranges according to values in one or more table columns. These storage objects can be in different table spaces, in the same table space or a combination of both.

The benefits of table partitioning include the ability to create very large tables. A partitioned table can contain vastly more data than an ordinary table. By dividing table data across multiple storage objects, users can significantly increase the size of a table.

Other warehouse-friendly capabilities include more-flexible administration capabilities. Users can now perform administrative tasks on individual data partitions, breaking down time-consuming maintenance operations into a series of smaller operations.

Viper also comes with more granular control of index placement. Indexes can be placed in different table spaces and managed individually.

In addition, Viper brings fast, easy roll-in or roll-out of data. This ability can be particularly useful in a data warehouse environment where you often move data in and out to run decision-support queries, Picciano said.

Meanwhile, Viper comes with improved query performance. Separating data with table partitioning allows users to improve query processing performance by avoiding scans of irrelevant data.

As far as Venom compression technology goes, Bloor Research's Howard described IBM's approach as tokenization. The software looks for patterns that occur in the data. So if you're looking at a customer record and you see Michigan occur, you store a token that indicates the string "Michigan." The token is stored in a lookup table in the data dictionary, thus saving storage space.

IBM claims between 30 and 70 percent storage savings. That depends on the application, of course, Howard pointed out, and on how much repetitive data you're talking about.

Venom also raises one immediate issue, Howard said: Namely, if you have to compress and then decompress data to access it, there will be an overhead involved. Will that then lead to a performance hit?

As it turns out, it doesn't, given Venom's reliance on use of in-buffer data storage, as opposed to disk storage, along with its compressed run-time. There's less back-and-forth to the disk, which actually can result in slight performance improvements, Picciano said.

"We have seen some modest performance gains, in the transactional and analytical spaces," he said. "Mostly [performance is] the same, with maybe a bit of advantage."

As far as storage savings go, Picciano said IBM is seeing "tremendous results from customers and analysts," on the order of 55 percent direct disk savings.

Next Page: The bottom line.