How to search effectively for known problems

There are many resources available that describe known problems, including Db2® Known Issues, whitepapers, IBM® Redbooks® publications, Technotes, and manuals. It is important to be able to effectively search these (and other) resources in order to quickly determine whether a solution already exists for the problem you are experiencing.

Before searching, you should have a clear understanding of your problem situation.

Once you have a clear understanding of what the problem situation is, you need to create a list of search keywords to increase your chances of finding the existing solutions. Here are some tips:

  1. Use multiple words in your search. The more pertinent search terms you use, the better your search results will be.
  2. Start with specific results, and then go to broader results if necessary. For example, if too few results are returned, then remove some of the less pertinent search terms and try it again. Alternatively, if you are uncertain which keywords to use, you can perform a broad search with a few keywords, look at the type of results that you receive, and be able to make a more informed choice of additional keywords.
  3. Sometimes it is more effective to search for a specific phrase. For example, if you enter: "administration notification file" (with the quotation marks) you will get only those documents that contain the exact phrase in the exact order in which you type it. (As opposed to all documents that contain any combination of those three words).
  4. Use wildcards. If you are encountering a specific SQL error, search for "SQL5005<wildcard>", where <wildcard> is the appropriate wildcard for the resource you're searching. This is likely to return more results than if you had merely searched for "SQL5005" or "SQL5005c ".
  5. If you are encountering a situation where your instance ends abnormally and produces trap files, search for known problems using the first two or three functions in the trap or core file's stack traceback. If too many results are returned, try adding keywords "trap", "abend" or "crash".
  6. If you are searching for keywords that are operating-system-specific (such as signal numbers or errno values), try searching on the constant name, not the value. For example, search for "EFBIG" instead of the error number 27.

In general, search terms that are successful often involve:

  • Words that describe the command run
  • Words that describe the symptoms
  • Tokens from the diagnostics