Benefits
By using DB2® Utilities Solution Pack, you can simplify the management and operation of your utilities and improve their performance at the same time.
DB2 Utilities Solution Pack provides the following benefits:
- Authorization to run DB2 Utilities Suite and components to enhance utility capabilities
- Running the DB2 Utilities Suite with components designed to optimize utility performance, resource utilization of utility management activities, and extend utilities allows you to get the maximum benefit from your use of DB2 utilities.
- Proactive administration of your DB2 environment
Today's global enterprise faces unprecedented challenges as it strives to recruit, train, deploy, and retain expert IT staff on the mainframe. Even the best information management professionals work with ever-increasing constraints of time, skill, and resources.
As database administrators retire, a global business needs innovative approaches to maintain its investment in mainframe skills. New IT professionals who replace retiring DBAs typically need up to five years of experience to effectively meet critical business requirements for a healthy, optimized, available DB2 environment. At the same time, experienced DBAs should not spend most of their time navigating ISPF panels when they might otherwise be setting strategic direction for the business. To whatever extent you can automate routine administrative tasks and minimize the need for decades of mainframe experience, the enterprise benefits.
Using DB2 Utilities Solution Pack IBM® Data Server Manager and IBM Autonomics Director for DB2 for z/OS®, this solution can provide the tools that you need to optimize both DB2 administration and your workforce. In combination, these tools help you to meet demanding service level agreements in a complex global business environment. They provide the following advantages:
- A consolidated view of your DB2 environment an intuitive, graphical web interface
- Configuration and setup options to help you achieve the precise level of automation that your business requires for database monitoring and maintenance tasks
For more information, see Proactive administration of your DB2 environment.
- Integrated monitoring and maintenance among pack components
- DB2 Automation Tool
- User-defined thresholds enable you to monitor DB2 objects at any time interval, and then take any corrective action that you define for each symptom.
- Autonomics Director for DB2 can proactively take actions that DB2 Automation Tool does already. Instead of waiting for user intervention to resolve a condition, you can take appropriate action automatically when your tools environment detects that DB2 exceeded a specified threshold.
- Autonomics enablement features that are available in DB2 Automation Tool feed alerts and recommendations to IBM Data Server Manager for a one-stop view of DB2 status and health.
- DB2 High Performance Unload
- LOB and XML features support unloading LOB and XML data from image copies.
- OUTPUT data supports SPANNED FORMAT.
- ORDER CLUSTER or ORDER BY options are supported for UNLOAD FORMAT INTERNAL
- When you unload from image copy, you can use OBID_REPORT with a non-production run to obtain a list of object IDs.
- DB2 Recovery Expert
- DB2 Recovery Expert provides the ability to backup an entire DB2 system (full image or data only), a partial DB2 system at the volume level through the use of system backup profiles, or object-level backup. It can also provide object level recovery, which enables users to recover individual DB2 objects or groups of related objects from a system backup or from image copies. Users create application profiles that contain the information that is used to recover a DB2 subsystem's objects to a desired point in time.Using DB2 Recovery Expert to automate and manage traditional disaster recovery processes simplifies disaster recovery procedures, reduces recovery time, and makes the recovery process less error-prone. The DB2 Recovery Expert Intelligent Disaster Recovery Manager runs at some set interval at the local site, performing the following functions:
- Analyzes, prepares, and identifies any new assets to be sent to the recovery site.
- Copies and then conditions DB2 recovery data sets (RECONS) with the recovery assets to be used at the remote site.
- Creates JCL that can be executed at the disaster recovery site to recover the DB2 system.
- Produces a detailed report showing all tapes that need to be transported to the disaster recovery site.
- DB2 Sort
- DB2 Sort works with DB2 High Performance Unload and DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool to read files directly before performing a sort.
- When you specify that DB2 Sort processes sorts for DB2 Utilities and other DB2 management tools, you can significantly reduce processor consumption and performance. You do this by running DB2 LOAD with the extended syntax that DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool provides, such as PRESORT, CONSTANT and VALUEIF.
- DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool
- DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool works with DB2 Automation Tool to generate the mapping table and mapping-table index when running a REORG TABLESPACE.
- DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool sends statistics to Autonomics Director for DB2 that help with workload balancing.
- Increased availability
- DB2 DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool provides greater control over utility operations. The following examples describe some of the benefits:
- Reduces application downtime by maintaining access to business-critical objects
- Reduces DBA intervention by canceling threads automatically
- Optimized processor utilization
- DB2 DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool provides significant savings on costly processor consumption:
- Saves on processor utilization and elapsed time by automatically creating the mapping table during a REORG
- Reduces processor utilization and elapsed time with the PRESORT option during a LOAD
- Reduces repeated CPU consumption by ensuring utilities run successfully the first time
- Improves availability and efficiency by using the DB2 Automation Tool to generate CHECK DATA on related sets of objects. DB2 DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool then discards data rows to a flat file.
- More efficient LOAD and UNLOAD operations
The DB2 High Performance Unload component alleviates some of the problems that are associated with unloading large amounts of data.
Because of the large amount of time consumed by large sequential reads of DB2 tables, UNLOAD operations are difficult to schedule during increasingly-shrinking batch windows. Performance issues can become critical when several UNLOAD operations read the same table space concurrently.
In this situation, DB2 buffer pool management can cause multiple programs to compete for the same data. This competition among multiple programs can result in the following challenges:
- Conflicts in the use of the DB2 buffer pool
- Overwrites of buffers that are serving several UNLOAD operations
- Multiple reads of the same DB2 pages
- Channel conflicts
To address these problems, DB2 High Performance Unload provides a fast way to sequentially read and share a DB2 table space among multiple unloads. Whenever possible, DB2 High Performance Unload processes requests to unload data from the same table space in parallel. You can create different output files during the same UNLOAD process at almost no additional cost.
For example, you can unload a list of customers who have payments due this week and another list of customers whose birthdays are on the first day of the week. You can create these lists in a single execution of DB2 High Performance Unload at a fraction of the cost that is required by traditional approaches that run UNLOAD operations twice.
DB2 High Performance Unload can decrease the time it takes to unload certain DB2 tables by invoking DB2 Sort. You can increase performance when DB2 must sort the result set or when unloading from a traditional or inline image copy.
- Improved sort processing
DB2 Sort improves the performance of utility sort processing, especially in environments with large volumes of data, large table spaces, or large indexes.
- Efficient and secure utility syntax management
The Utility Syntax Monitor that is available in the DB2 Utilities Enhancement Tool has robust capabilities to help you with utility syntax. The following are only some of the advantages that the monitor can provide:
- Enables you to establish and maintain company-wide DB2 utility syntax policies
- Extends utility syntax to reduce system costs and improve availability
- Provides an additional layer of security to protect business critical objects and ensure a secure recovery strategy
- Enables you to take advantage of new DB2 utility syntax without changing JCL, thereby reducing costs and avoiding the need to change multiple batch jobs