On April 23rd IBM announced the release of IBM I V7R4. Don’t bother calling your favorite IBM Business Partner just yet to get your order rolling. Availability date for the release is June 21st. V7R3 was announced along with a Technical Refresh of V7R3 and a new software product that stole the attention of the OS announcement. That was Db2 Mirror. Looking back, it’s been just over 3 years since the release of V7R3. Doing a little research on the last several OS releases, its noted that there has been no pattern of IBM’s schedule. The shortest time between releases was 9 months and the longest span was 4 years and 7 months between V7R1 and V7R2.
Probably the most asked for new feature added to IBM I in V7R4 is Authority Collection, allowing you to determine the authority required for a specific object. This differs from the previous capability that allowed you to capture authority by user versus object. From a security perspective, this allows you to lock down objects for those authorized to run applications.
For an additional development language, IBM added R language. R is an open source language popular among statisticians and those involved in data analytics and data mining. In addition, there have been enhancement made to improve the performance of the SQL engine. If you’d like a more comprehensive list of enhancements you can reference IBM’s announcement document here:
From an announcement hype standpoint, that leaves Db2 Mirror. Db2 Mirror provides continuous availability for mission-critical applications. Its goal is to provide a Recovery Time Objective of zero. It mirrors database updates between two separate nodes using direct memory access over Ethernet (RoCE). Think 2 nodes in the same data center, or maybe the same server, replicating database updates from memory. Because of the design function, near-zero latency is required so don’t think about this as a disaster recovery feature. It’s true HA within the data center for those ultimate mission-critical applications.
If you would like additional information on this announcement or want help in ordering the upgrade, feel free to give me a call.
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