Thoughts on DB2
In his latest article for Database Journal Julian Stuhler shares his pick of the most important current trends in the world of IBM Information Management. Some are completely new and some are evolutions of existing technologies, and he’s betting that every one of them will have some sort of impact on data management professionals during the next 12-18 months. Click here for the full article.
IBM is showcasing it’s global dialogue with indsutry leaders. View the webcasts below.
We’re delighted to announce that we are the first IBM Busuiness partners in Europe to work with pureScale!
Arguably IBM’s most important new feature for DB2 LUW, pureScale was anounced in October last year and quickly caught the attention of the industry. Based on elading System z data sharing technology, DB2 pureScale integrate IBM technologies to keep critical systems available 24/7.
Triton’s team of DB2 experts spent a week at IBM Labs in Boeblingen, Germany on a research and development project. During their time there Triton’s consultants gained practical experience in the installation, operation and use of a pureScale environment as well as testing DB2 pureScale for scalability and resilence.
“It’s certainly been an interesting week here in Boeblingen and we have really been able to take a deep dive into pureScale. IN terms of scalability and resilence, pureScale really is second to non in the marketplace” Says Iqbal Goralwalla, Principal Consultant – DB2 Midrange.
Despite a very “interesting” journey back to the UK over the weekend due to cancelled flights the team are eager to continue with the DB2 pureScale research project and plans to produce a series of blogs, podcasts and technical briefings over the next few months so watch this space!
Webcast from IBM.
April 20, 2010, 11 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. UTC
The life of a database administrator (DBA) is not easy these days. Database performance issues, worries about data corruption and loss, expanding business requirements, and rising chargeback costs are just a few of the unnerving trends that are causing DBA personnel to be stretched further and further — and closer to the breaking point.
We invite you to attend this complimentary teleconference to learn about the best practices and success stories of companies in a wide variety of industries who have turned their DBA staffing around with the help of IBM DB2® solutions on z/OS®. Over-burdened DBAs can get help and valuable support by using DB2 solutions for performance management, administration, change management, backup and recovery, cloning, and data governance. As a DBA, it puts you in a position to lower operational costs, increase your productivity and help your enterprise prepare for its future success.
In this teleconference, you’ll learn about DB2 solutions that can help:
Speaker: Jay Bruce, IBM DB2 Tools for z/OS Architect and Strategist and Ron Haupert, Senior Technologist, Rocket Software
Click here for more info
If you make use of RTS and DEFINE NO, you might want to review your processes to ensure that you’re picking up all of the tablespaces you should be……
Since V7 of DB2 for z/OS, IBM has provided a Real Time Statistics (RTS) feature, which is a set of tables that DB2 keeps (more or less) up to date with recent activity against all tables and indexes in the system. In particular, the RTS tables provide detailed information on the amount of update activity that has happened since a given object was last REORGed or had RUNSTATS executed against it. That information is obviously very useful when determining when those utilities need to be run next, so many sites base their housekeeping schedules on this information (either using their own bespoke code and procedures, or a vendor tool such as IBM’s DB2 Automation Tool). In particular, looking at the number of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations as a proportion of the total rows in the table (using the TOTALROWS column) is useful, so you can reorg a table when more than 10% of the rows have been changed, for example.
We came across a problem recently, where one of our customers was using this feature in a DB2 9 for z/OS subsystem that had lots of DEFINE NO tablespaces (which instructs DB2 to defer creating the underlying VSAM dataset until the table is actually referenced – very handy for ERP systems such as SAP that create a large number of tables that are never used in a given environment).
For normal DEFINE YES tablespaces, a row is created in the RTS tables as soon as the tablespace is created, with the statistics initially set to zero values and updated in real time to reflect activity against the underlying table. Unfortunately, the situation is different for DEFINE NO tablespaces: the row isn’t created until the VSAM dataset is defined on first use (no problem there) but instead of zeroes some fields (including the number of rows in the TOTALROWS column) are set to null instead. That null value isn’t updated until the first REORG or LOAD is run against the table, so if the table is populated via INSERT rather than LOAD, your nice RTS monitoring routines may never trigger that first REORG!
This “feature” has been reported to IBM, but in the meantime if you make use of RTS and DEFINE NO, you might want to review your processes to ensure that you’re picking up all of the tablespaces you should be……
It’s a big news day in the world of DB2 for z/OS with IBM announcing the Beta Launch of DB2 10. There has been much speculation about how this version is going to look and we had a sneak preview at the IBM Gold Consultant Day at IDUG last year – http://www.triton.co.uk/blog/?p=321
“With DB2 for z/OS, IBM has once again redefined the benchmark for large-scale database systems. I’m particularly impressed by the potential for significant productivity improvements through the new temporal data support, enhanced automatic functions and SQL and XML extentions. These enhancements will help our customers to directly drive competitive advantage through more rapid deployment of application and warehouse workloads.” Julian Stuhler
Click here for more info.
Find out by attending the “Breaking away with Business Analytics” webcast IBM are running on 28th Jan.
There will be leading figures from IBM’s Information Management team and case studies to highlight where this approach has worked in the real world.
Take a look at Julian Stuhler’s IOD blog post for move background on the subject.
IBM has issued a “Red Alert” for DB2 9 for z/OS.
DB2 9 for z/OS potential data corruption and DB2 crash after using the CATMAINT UPDATE SCHEMA SWITCH utility, which is new in DB2 9.
For full details click here – http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/20100112.html
After sitting the Optim sales mastery exam and successfully passing it, I can honestly say that having a hands on approach with the product was definitely the best way forward. My revision otherwise would have been laborious, in that everything would have been based around reading pdf…after pdf…after pdf. I am of the opinion that this not the most efficient way to learn. For me a ‘new product’ such as Optim cannot be mastered to any sort of level by reading, revision requires some sort of application interaction.
Although, it could be said that the ‘beginners’ nature of the exam did not really require much in the way of real life application interaction and I could have navigated through the exam quite easily with traditional reading. It all depends upon the individual. I for one found it much easier to move away from the pdf files and make use of the application and try some things out, it allows for the information you have read to really sink in.
The exam itself was multiple choice and covered everything from installation through to archiving and more, a broad subject area. Optim can be quite an involved application which is measured by the complexities of your database environment. So the learning curve can be intense but also rewarding when set-up properly.
This particular exam touched on each subject area covered within the revision notes guide, but did not get too technically challenging. The exam is as it says on the tin “a way of examing a users basic knowledge of the subject and whether they know what they are selling.”
In my next blog I will be looking at installing Optim…
If you weren’t able to attend IBM Information on Demand 2009 you can access presentations from the event at the IOD You Tube Channel – click here.
