Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Try MONREPORT to generate monitoring reports

DB2 includes several system-defined modules that can come in handy. One that I would like to point you to is MONREPORT. As the name may hint at it can be used to generate monitoring reports, i.e., to retrieve monitoring data and generate text reports out of the data. Basically, some useful reports with lots of health indicators and statistics are just a call away.

Did you try "call monreport.dbsummary()" yet? Most (all?) the statistics that you need in a single report without any sweat. The module also has procedures to retrieve information about current SQL activities, package cache statistics, lock waits, etc. What is interesting to note is that the monreport procedures utilize the new monitoring infrastructure introduced in DB2 9.7, the MON_GET functions. And if you search the DB2 system catalog, you can even find the sources to the procedures in the MONREPORT modules. Something to take a look at, learn from, and be inspired...

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

DB2, I love you!

Today is Valentine's Day and - my wife is hopefully not reading this blog entry - time to say "I love you" to DB2. I love that you are so uncomplicated. You take care of memory management on your own, you are so resource-conscious, so versatile! You store things away in a fraction of space I would have needed. I know you understand me, regardless of whether I speak SQL, XPath, XQuery, SQL/PL, PL/SQL, etc. You don't even mind if I use an Oracle dialect. And you are resilient and you continue, even when I am down.

And best of all, you already have thought of flowers, they are built in.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Quick answer: Yes, there is DB2 LUW on the mainframe under zLinux

One of the harder Google and Bing searches is to find out whether DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (DB2 LUW) is supported on a Linux system running on the mainframe (System z). Often only references to DB2 for z/OS or DB2 on Linux are found. Anyway, to answer a question that I got, DB2 for Linux is supported on the so-called zLinux and it might come to a surprise that you can choose between DB2 for z/OS (with a deep system integration) or DB2 for the distributed platform.