Triton Consulting - Confessions of a DB2 Geek

DB2 Gets More Bite With COBRA

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

IBM has been making huge technical strides with their flagship database, DB2, over the past few years. As expected, the recent launch of DB2 9.7 has not failed to impress, incorporating even more improvements.

Click here to download the white paper.

DB2 9.7, also known as the COBRA release, has made up significant ground on Oracle. The ease with which organisations are now able to migrate from Oracle to DB2 has been enhanced so dramatically that it is now an enticing opti...

Trials & Tribulations of 24/7 Database Management

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

James Cockayne, Principal DBA at Camelot Group gives us his views on key issues for DBAs, the newest active-active availability solutions and how a DBA can ensure they get their all important beauty sleep!

Just how important is it for organisations to ensure they have a robust database availability & disaster recovery solution?

The database is always the lynchpin of an application. Without the database, the application doesn't function, and there's a bunch of angry users wanting to know why (not to mentio...

DB2 LUW Security - DB2 Whisperings

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

DB2 Configuration Parameters - What They Whisper About Security Behind Your Back.

An article by Rebecca Bond.

I've always wondered what DB2 would say about security IF it could talk. Maybe the conversation would be something like this.....

DBM DISCOVER: "So, today she set me to DISABLE. I know...I know...it's for my own good, but I feel SO lonely...

DB2 LUW gains more Mainframe-style functionality

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

When you think of a database you think of rows and columns, or that is what was thought of a few years ago. The modern DB2 data server for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (LUW) is a lot more than just a bunch of rows and columns. It is now a powerful server able to replicate many of the features provided by the mainframe. As each iteration of the LUW product is developed, further features are incorporated. In hindsight this has been a long time coming, since the mainframe is recognized industry wide as the leader in ...

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Last month we were delighted to be given the opportunity to visit IBM’s research and development centre in Boeblingen, Germany. Before I get on to what exactly we were doing there I’d like to share a little information about the centre itself as it’s quite a place! Opened in 1953, Boeblingen is host to a whopping 2000 IT specialists, electrical engineers and physicists working on over 40 projects! Their focus is on ...

Pure Genius! pureScale has arrived!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Since its introduction to the market in the mid-90s, DB2 for z/OS data sharing became the gold standard for enterprise data-serving scalability and availability. Customers using DB2 on midrange platforms have long been calling for similar capabilities. This has now arrived in the form of DB2 pureScale.

Based on the industry leading System z data sharing architecture, DB2 pureScale integrates ...

A Perspective on Database Performance

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In this article, I want to take a look at database performance, and the reasons why it remains one of the most important topics for any DBA, developer or systems administrator. I'll also cover some golden rules for performance tuning, which tend to apply regardless of the specific platform or application you're responsible for.

Why bother?
So, what's the big deal with database performance? Fundamentally, database performance tuning is done for two basic reasons, and either or both can apply for...

Triton Consulting are first to work with pureScale

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

DB2 experts, Triton Consulting are the first IBM Business Partners in Europe to work with DB2 pureScale - IBM's latest and most important new feature for DB2 LUW.

Triton have a team of DB2 experts spending a week at IBM Labs in Boeblingen Germany on a research and development project. During their time there Triton's consultants will be gaining practical experience in the installation, operation and use of a pureScale environment as well as testing DB2 pureScale for scalability and resilience.

Based on ...

Adding some zIIP to IBM DB2

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

What Can Speciality Processors Do for You?

Article by Julian Stuhler for Database Journal

Introduction
For some time now, DB2 for z/OS has been the major user and benefactor of the zIIP engine: one of a number of System z technologies collectively known as "speciality processors". This article provides an overview of the zIIP an...

DB2 pureScale Coupling Facility

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We were lucky enough to get an opportunity to spend a week in the IBM Boeblingen Labs in Germany, to get some hands on experience with DB2 9.8 – pureScale – or Data Sharing on mid-range.

The platform that we were working with was a five node configuration – two coupling facilities (CFs) and three DB2 member nodes. This was all implemented in three partitioned pSeries p550 servers, with 1TB of disk supporting it.

On z/OS, the performance and behaviour of the CFs in a Data Sharing ...

DB2 pureScale - Insert Load & Replication

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Following on from James Gill’s recent blog post about the Coupling Facility today I’m sharing with you our experiences of working with Insert Load & Replication in DB2 pureScale.

In order to test the load capacity of the IBM DB2 pureScale machine we needed some test data and lots of it! Being somewhat familiar with the capabilities of the CF on z/OS I knew that a few thousand records would not be enough.

After some checking about, I decided to “stand on the shoulders of giants” and use the EMPLO...

August Announcements

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Despite the traditional slow down as many people take a well-earned summer holiday, this month has seen a few interesting announcements from IBM which will impact many of us over the next year or two.

DB2 for z/OS V8: The End Is Nigh
I've been spending time with a few large customers recently helping them upgrade from DB2 for z/OS V7 to V8. This upgrade is usually one of the more painful ones, as the move to a 64-bit platform can result in some performance/CPU regression for certain workloads, and t...

A DB2 pureScale Primer

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

DB2 pureScale adopts many of the same concepts and terminology as the well-established DB2 for z/OS Data Sharing technology, usually considered to be the "gold standard" for shared-disk database architectures. Multiple DB2 instances, or "members" accept and service incoming DB2 work, with all of them accessing a single copy of the data (usually held on a shared, high-performance, fault tolerant disk subsystem).

So, how do you stop multiple processes all updating the same data at the same time? That's where the clev...

Geek-Tastic Webcasts with the IBM Toronto Lab Team

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

If you haven't been tuning into the DB2 pureScale webcast series then we're not sure where you've been but you've certainly missed out on some great info!

Luckily though the DB2 Geek has recorded all of the webcasts so you can listen to them at your leisure!

Episode 1 - Get the lowdown on DB2 pureScale with Matt Huras - lead DB2 pureScale architect at IBM - watch now.

Episode 2 - ...

Thinking of migrating to DB2 10?

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

DB2 10 for z/OS will support skip migration from V8 as well as from V9. Despite DB2 9 containing some very attractive new functions and being Generally Available for nearly 3 years now, the recent global economic downturn has seriously impacted IT budgets and many customers still find themselves running DB2 V8 (or even earlier releases).

Who is the skip migration going to benefit? If you're brave or unlucky enough to be running on V7 (unsupported for well over a year now) you'll hopefully be planning an upgrade to V8 very soon...

A Geeks' Christmas Carol

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT

On the first day of Christmas

My DBA gave to me

A tuning tweak for my b-tree

On the second day of Christmas

My DBA gave to me

Two reorg jobs,

And a tuning tweak for my b-tree

"Staggering" Transaction Rates With DB2 pureScale

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT

DB2 pureScale was first announced back in October 2009 and created huge interest in the market. In April of this year Triton sent a team of their experts to the IBM labs in Germany and were the first European IBM Business Partners to work with DB2 pureScale. Since then, the team have been working hard to build their skills with DB2 pureScale.

Although DB2 pureScale is only currently supported on IBM X Servers and Power Systems, Triton have shown that it is possible to implement DB2 pureScale on a low cost commodity cluster.

...

5 Clicks to DB2 Success!

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In our latest DB2 Geeks podcast we chat to Scott Hayes, IBM Gold Consultant, CEO of DBI Software and fellow DB2 Geek!

In this episode Scott talks to us about the 5 clicks to success methodology and gives some tips on improving DB2 Performance without throwing money at new hardware!

Database Performance Challenges
Utilities are now running automatically. Autonomic Tuning is making automatic changes to memory configurations. Dynamic SQL has a mind of it's own and is i...

Behind the scenes on our latest venture

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Earlier this month we announced our new partnership with DBI Software but just how did this "marriage made in heaven" actually come about?

Well the idea was born during a conversation between Triton Director, Julian Stuhler and DBI CEO, Scott Hayes. Both IBM Gold Consultants, these two renowned DB2 experts realised that our two organisations are perfectly matched! Through the partnership both organisations will be able to provide existing customers with a more comprehensive service and re...

SECADM musing

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I had fun with the new SECADM authority introduced in DB2 9.7 recently. I wanted to restore a database on a test server from a backup of the production database taken on a production server. The production database DB2SEC had been created by the user DB2INST1 in the instance DB2INST1. The restore on the test server was being carried out by user DB2INST2 in the instance DB2INST2. The restore worked smoothly - couldn't get much easier I thought. Next step was to give privileges to users to perform various tasks on the DB2SEC database and its object...

Make sure your tools are up to the job

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

We had a customer who had a COGNOS 8/BI development environment running against DB2 AIX V9.5. They were having issues with extremely long elapsed times for COGNOS-generated queries (over 30 minutes!). Temp space was being exceeded and users were increasing it but still experiencing the same problem. The users checked COGNOS which seemed fine and they also ran DB2 Index Advisor and created additional indexes but to no avail.

So, Triton stepped in. We ran some analysis using a tool which we find extremely useful - Brother Eagle, ...

As bad as it gets - A DB2 support nightmare!

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine the scene - a broken database on an unsupported version of DB2, with no backups or log files to recover the database. Yes, this one really was the stuff of nightmares!

An erroneous script had deleted a few transaction log files that had a 'last changed' date of more than 45 days. The same script had caused other errors and a database restart was required, but the database did not start. The database was looking for an old log file, which had just been deleted by the script. As the policy was to retain the backups and ar...

Sathy's SECADM Secrets

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In the recent post - SECADM Musings, Iqbal discussed the RESTORE scenario in 9.7 where the privileges will be 'lost' when restoring the database to a different instance and a work around for the situation. There are other ways to tackle the same issue and here are two of them.

a) Consider that a database SAMPLE from db2inst1 was restored to db2inst2

On db2inst1, catalog the database

db2 ca...

To reorganise or not to reorganise

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

By Philip Carrington - Holiday Extras - A Triton Consulting Client
www.holidayextras.co.uk

From my blog statistics I can see that a common question which leads people to my door is "db2 reorganisation required" or the equivalent. So here I am assuming that you have your Health Monitor service turned on and you have received a warning from either the Health Monitor Screen in the DB2 Control ...

Diagnostic Helpers

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

When opening a PMR with IBM, you will often be asked to send them some specific diagnostics so they can investigate further. IBM has recently issued some new guidance on transmitting this information to the DB2 support team via FTP. The old information APAR(II14631) has been closed and replaced with a new one: II11945. See https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg1II11945 for further details.

While we're on the subject of diagnostics, the ...

Time Travelling with DB2 10 for z/OS

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Most IT systems need to keep historical as well as current information. Previously, these kinds of requirements would have involved the DBA and application developers spending valuable time creating and testing the code and associated database design to support the historical perspective, while minimizing any performance impact.

DB2 10 provides this functionality as part of the database engine. The temporal data feature gives:

Improved DBA and developer productivity
Reduced errors in application code
Reduced time...

DB2 Explain doesn't do it for Developers

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

So there I was running a regular check of PLAN_TABLE in a pre-production environment, checking for any potential poor access paths, when I noticed a new package with a somewhat worrying access path. A tablescan of a 10 million row table with a nasty non-matching index scan, via a nested loop join, of a 20 million row table. Not nice at all.

After some investigation, I found the Developer responsible (let's refer to him as Dave for reasons of anonymity). Dave the Developer tells me that the offending package/SQL is part of a da...

A Fresh Look at Setting Session Isolation Level

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The isolation level determines how data accessed by one application is isolated from the other. In other words, the degree to which rows accessed by an application is available to another.

A description of the isolations level can be found here - http://ibm.co/qLofSg

It is important to note that the isolation level is associated with an application/session. It is not the property of the database.
The default isolation level for a connection is Cursor Stability (CS). ...

DB2 10 - Secrets of Scalability

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Storage constraints remain the single biggest factor in limiting the scalability of a single DB2 system today. Each process that runs concurrently within that system requires some storage, so the more workload a given system is asked to handle, the higher the storage requirements. Other factors such as logging and internal latching also play a part in limiting the scalability of a single DB2 system, and as bottlenecks are removed elsewhere these become increasingly important.

DB2 10 for z/OS delivers significant new functionali...

DB2 Geek Review of 2011

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It's that time of year again, I'll soon be waving goodbye to my DB2 Geek colleagues and heading home for mountains of turkey, mince pies and the odd glass of mulled wine. However, before I leave you I thought it would be good to share my personal DB2 Geek highlights of 2011. So, here we go...

January
We cleared our post-celebration heads by getting together with our fellow DB2 Geeks across the pond and announcing to the world our new partnership. What a great way to start the new year!

T...

DB2DART - Hints & Tips for the DBA

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The DB2 Analysis & Reporting tool or DB2DART is one of the lesser used performance tools and has traditionally been used with IBM support. However, DB2DART can be one of the most powerful tools in the DBA's kit bag. It can help increase DBA productivity in crisis situations and earn the DBA some well-deserved brownie points!

DB2DART is an "offline" tool for checking the architectural correctness of a database. Using DB2DART you are able to check the validity of meta-data structures, page headers, row headers etc. It is critica...