Mask recommendations

Although Db2® Admin Tool provides flexibility in specifying masks, think carefully about your masks specifications to avoid errors.

Consider the following recommendations:

• Use specific masks when possible. If you use a very broad name mask when objects in the compare scope already have that name, unexpected rows might be added to the version file when processing objects. This situation can ultimately result in an error and might terminate the compare process.
  For example, suppose that you use the following specification to mask any storage group name to ABCD:

  SGNAME: *, ABCD

  If a storage group in the scope of the comparison is already named ABCD, duplicate records will exist in the version file. These duplicate records result in an error during the compare. To avoid this situation, use one of the following more specific masks if possible:

  TSSGNAME:tablespace_schema.tablespace_name: *, ABCD
  IXSGNAME:index_schema.index_name: *, ABCD

• Consider whether using an ignore is a better option.
  For example, consider the following mask example:

  SGNAME: *, ABCD

  In this case, if you do not want to compare the storage groups at all, use an ignore. You can ignore the storage groups by using a specific ignore on STORNAME or by using a generic ignore on STORAGE.