IBM Impact 2009: Reflections from Gregg Willhoit

In this podcast Gregg Willhoit provides a recap of his presentation at IBM Impact, and the feedback he received about the direction DataDirect Technologies is going with Shadow. This podcasts last for 2:00.

Click here for listen to the podcast: http://blogs.datadirect.com/media/GreggWillhoit_May26_IBMImpactPresentation.mp3

Gregg Willhoit:

I think from my presentation that I gave at SOA Impact I got a lot of good feedback about where we’re going with Shadow. Specifically, with regard to CICS. What we’re doing is we are interacting with and providing support for CICS programs and data for SQL type users as well as web services users. And where we add value – in one area is that, for example, in SQL access for non-relational data, and lets in this case say CICS VSAM, it’s extremely computationally expensive to provide relational access to non-relational data. So what we’re doing is, hopefully we’re providing the user with a strong motivation to keep the data on the mainframe, to keep the data in CICS VSAM. There is no need to move the data off the mainframe to do ad hoc analysis on it when you can use a product like Shadow, which actually offloads to the zIIP 100% of the SQL processing that’s done when accessing non-relational data, in this case CICS VSAM.

So all of the complex relational transformations like joins, group bys, aggregations scaler functions, any of those techniques that are used to provide true ANSI 92 SQL access to mainframe data are offloaded to the zIIP, and they are done so in a coherent memory structure, which means that there is no need for TCP/IP communication between the SQL engine and the backend or the CICS data source. So it’s extremely efficient, and then in this type of solution, of course, both Shadow and CICS are managed by WLM, so it doesn’t actually add to the management of the datacenter management overhead that one would see if one were using an Office product. For example, to provide SQL access to CICS VSAM. So I got a lot of good feedback on that message; as well as of course our continuing effort to provide for greater zIIP offload to CICS data with regards to web services.