Minimizing the impact of maintenance on availability

Maintaining a Db2 database solution involves tasks such as software and hardware upgrades, performance tuning, backups, statistics collection, and monitoring. Reducing the impact of these maintenance activities on availability requires careful planning and using Db2 features that support ongoing operations. Here’s how to manage maintenance effectively to minimize downtime and keep your system accessible.

Before you begin

Important: In Db2® 11.5.8 and later, Mutual Failover high availability is supported when using Pacemaker as the integrated cluster manager. In Db2 11.5.6 and later, the Pacemaker cluster manager for automated fail-over to HADR standby databases is packaged and installed with Db2. In Db2 11.5.5, Pacemaker is included and available for production environments. In Db2 11.5.4, Pacemaker is included as a technology preview only, for development, test, and proof-of-concept environments.

Before you can use the following steps to minimize the impact of maintenance on the availability of your Db2 database solution, you must:

  • configure automatic maintenance; and

  • install the High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) feature.

Procedure

  1. Allow automatic maintenance to do your maintenance for you.

    Db2 database can automate many database maintenance activities. Once the automatic maintenance has been configured, the maintenance will happen without you taking any additional steps to perform that maintenance.

  2. Use a Db2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) rolling upgrade to minimize the impact of other maintenance activities.

    If you are upgrading software or hardware, or if you are modifying some database manager configuration parameters, the HADR feature enables you to accomplish those changes with minimal interruption of availability. This seamless change enabled by HADR is called a rolling upgrade.

    Some maintenance activities require you to shut down a database before performing the maintenance, even in the HADR environment. Under some conditions, the procedure for shutting down an HADR database is a little different than the procedure for shutting down a standard database: if an HADR database is started by a client application connecting to it, you must use the DEACTIVATE DATABASE command.