A significant further development in recent years has been the introduction of so-called BLU technology, a column-oriented in-memory storage option for data in analytical systems. By means of smart caching, single instruction multiple data (SIMD), data skipping and several other functionalities, the evaluation of data is very close to the hardware and memory-efficient.
In addition, new functions have been built into the database in recent years that significantly simplify the implementation, administration and operation of the data warehouse. For example, so-called temporal tables are available in Db2 as a functional feature that automatically historises the table contents for Slowly Changing Dimensions as an internal function and stores a time reference for the respective row. In addition, table areas can be automatically assigned to different storage areas depending on how often they are needed (Multi Temperature Data Management).