Use Case #2: batch window congestion

Challenge

A major California-based bank needed to expedite their evening batch processing. They were hard pressed to run the entire batch processing from the previous day’s account transactions before the start of business for the next day—their batch window was filling up. An over-full batch window could mean interrupted or incomplete processing and loss of interest on millions of transactions. The batch process is extremely I/O intensive. Even using DB2 buffering, the overwhelming amount of I/O grinds the system to a snail’s pace. Depending upon the specific systems, and the number of batch processes, this took more than 6 hours, and the situation was worsening. One solution was to buy additional hardware, but the customer was looking for a better solution.

Solution

To solve the batch window problem, again a set of in-memory tables were populated using the daily input files databases. This was a one-time only database access and represented the only I/Os needed for the batch process. The batch programs were then able to access all of the data required for in-memory tables, at memory speeds. Since these batch processes were so I/O intensive, the savings in processing time was remarkable. For this bank, the batch window “problem” was reduced from almost 8 hours to less than 30 minutes processing time.

Benefits

tableBASE batch optimization technology allowed this bank to dramatically reduce its batch window problem. Beyond this, however, the bank benefited from still further savings. Since the batch run time was so small, they were able to reduce the overall operation of the mainframe after hours, saving on overtime operation of the systems, reduced resource usage costs, and reduced overtime manpower costs.