Jazz with DB2 or Oracle ?
Dear all
What are the (real) pro's and con's to have either DB2 or Oracle database below RTC Jazz ?
Might sound like a stupid question, cause RTC might work best with DB2 cause both comes from IBM.
Both however, any evidence / white paper that shows the facts would be helpful.
Idea behind this strange question is, due to some security audits we are asked to thin about to encrypt database, then connection to database, bla bla ... and so on.
Then management came to the idea, why do you run Oracle for this and DB2 for RTC, shouldn't we only have one DB in the house ?
now it's your turn to answer
Would be also interesting to have a feeling what all the others here use, DB2 or other databases (except derby which comes from IBM delivered too)
3 answers
our usual suggestion is to use the enterprise DBMS you are most skilled with. Training up for a new DBMS and maintaining it is cost, so it is better to stay with what you know. We also have customers that have standards and need to stick with them. Some outsource the IT maintenance and also have no choice but to stay in the given standard.
I am not sure if we have measurements of DB performance to compare the performance between the systems.
We obviously run Jazz on DB2 in IBM, so we have most experience and testing done with it. This would suggest using DB2. But then again, if you know another DBMS better, how to backup and maintain it, there is some benefit in using that.
Comments
Ralph
thanks for the answer.
We have of course started with DB2 cause my assumption is that it fits to RTC better than a DBMS from other vendor.
Some more questions:
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In case we are forced internally to migrate e.g. to Oracle for some reason, are there migration strategies DB2
to Oracle ? - Will we lose DW history at all or can DW be taken over too as is ?
- Is there any whitepaper how to do encryption in the area of DB2 ?
Please bring some good answers so that we can stay on DB2 :-)
It is possible to encrypt the transport from DB2 to its client ( whether RTC or some other application ). I posted this some time back SSL w jdbc It is rather open ended no real answer or conclusion. Also, if you separate database on one host, application on another, depending on the proximity, a private LAN might be possible. That way, the transport is not encumbered by encryption, but neither will it be visible off the private LAN.
- If you need to migrate to another DB, the steps are described in the online help. You basically have to do a repotools export from the old and a repotools import to the new DB.
- As far as I am aware you can not migrate the data warehouse e.g. for RDDI. You will have to set up a new data warehouse. You will however, only loose some data e.g. for build result trends. I think the work item data is created from the history.
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I got involved with database encryption only the first time recently. I googled for encryption DB2 and did not find much (I did not try hard) there is an encryption that I think can not be used as the application would have to support it. In that discussion the agreement was that our customers with high security requirements don't use encryption. They make sure that the access to the hardware is restricted. They switch of internal https to be able to track what goes on.
- All encryption solutions (I am aware of) that would be transparent to the application e.g. disc encryption or db level table space encryption are only safe as long as the user account that the encryption is tied to is not compromised. As soon as it is, encryption is useless.
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Encryption reduces performace
as Ralph correctly stated the Data Warehouse needs to be rebuilt from scratch if you change DBMS, the impact is the following:
- The operational data store (ODS) part of the data warehouse needs to be fully loaded, so depending on the size of your repositories it can take anywhere between few hours to several days if using the standard data collection jobs. DCC might provide better performances.
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The old trending data will be lost, meaning that reports that relies on those data will only show results starting from the date the new data warehouse has been first populated. For example burndown charts for sprints in progress will show broken charts.
Francesco Chiossi