Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up, busy days for many database systems working in the background of brick and mortar and online shops. Will the infrastructure keep up with the traffic? Will response times be acceptable for shoppers and store personnel alike? How much revenue is made with which types of products? Many questions at the start of the holiday season.
There is an interesting feature in DB2 that shipped in version 9.7 FP5 (see here for the db2adutl feature announcement) and in version 10.1 to manage high peak load on DB2 systems. db2adutl now allows to UPLOAD recovery objects (backup images, archived logs) to TSM in a very simple way without breaking the log chain. Some examples of the new UPLOAD feature are shown here. The idea is to first archive to a fast disk instead to TSM, so that during a peak like Black Friday or Cyber Monday log archiving can keep up with the rest of the system. Later on, the recovery objects can be moved from disk to TSM to allow TSM-based recovery if needed.
Happy Thanksgiving (for those in the USA) and interesting shopping deals for all of us...
BTW: As of DB 10.1 archived logs can also be compressed reducing what needs to be written out.