Scheduling maintenance for high availability

Your Db2® database solution will require regular maintenance. You will have to perform maintenance such as: software or hardware upgrades; database performance tuning; database backups; statistics collection and monitoring for business purposes. You must minimize the impact of these maintenance activities on the availability of your database solution.

Before you begin

Before you can schedule maintenance activities, you must identify those maintenance activities that you will have to perform on your database solution.

Procedure

To schedule maintenance, perform the following steps:

  1. Identify periods of low database activity.

    It is best to schedule maintenance activities for low-usage times (those periods of time when the fewest user applications are making requests of the database system). Depending on the type of business applications you are creating, there might even be periods of time when no user applications are accessing the database system.

  2. Categorize the maintenance activities you must perform according to the following:

    • The maintenance can be automated

    • You must bring the database solution offline while you perform the maintenance

    • You can perform the maintenance while the database solution is online

  3. For those maintenance activities that can be automated, configure automated maintenance using one of the following methods:

    • Use the auto_maint configuration parameter

    • Use one of the system stored procedure called AUTOMAINT_SET_POLICY and AUTOMAINT_SET_POLICYFILE

  4. If any of the maintenance activities you must perform require the database server to be offline, schedule those offline maintenance activities for those low-usage times.
  5. For those maintenance activities that can be performed while the database server is online:

    • Identify the availability impact of running those online maintenance activities.

    • Schedule those online maintenance activities so as to minimize the impact of running those maintenance activities on the availability of the database system.

    For example: schedule online maintenance activities for low-usage times; and use throttling mechanisms to balance the amount of system resources the maintenance activities use.