Minimizing the impact of maintenance on availability

You will have to perform maintenance on your Db2® database solution such as: software or hardware upgrades; database performance tuning; database backups; statistics collection; and monitoring for business purposes. Minimizing the impact that performing that maintenance has on the availability of your solution involves careful scheduling of offline maintenance, and using Db2 features and functionality that reduce the availability impact of online maintenance.

Before you begin

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.