Remote storage requirements

Remote storage aliases are supported by a select number of Db2® commands for accessing data on the IBM® Cloud Object Storage or the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). In order to use the select Db2 commands, several configurations to the system are required to account for this feature.

Supported platforms and prerequisites

This feature is supported on SuSE and RHEL Linux. For IBM® Cloud Object Storage, only the Swift type is currently supported.

The remote storage support in Db2 requires the following packages to be installed:
  • libcURL, version 7.19.7 and up
  • libxml2, version 2.7.6 and up

Local staging path

A local staging path is needed for holding temporary files in the following situations:
  • Downloading an object from a remote storage server
  • Uploading an object from a local file system to a remote storage server
The default staging path is in <instance_directory>/sqllib/tmp/RemoteStorage.xxxx, where xxxx refers to the database partition number.

The default staging path can be configured by the DB2_OBJECT_STORAGE_LOCAL_STAGING_PATH variable. The size of the file system for this staging path must be sufficient to hold the working files of the utility, such as the source files for Load, Ingest, and images for Backup and Restore.

Compressed input data

Users are able to load directly from compressed input data files stored in the supported remote storage.

The following common compression formats are supported:
  • *.gz - created by gzip utility
  • *.zip - created by zip utility

It is required that the compressed file name has the same name as the original file, with the additional .zip or .gz file extension. For example, if a file has the name db2load.txt, it is expected that the compressed file name is db2load.txt.zip or db2load.txt.gz.