IMS Disaster Recovery Thre of the main IMS disaster recovery hardware solutions are: Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS); DASD Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (DPRC) or Extended Remote Copying (XRC); Remote tape. The two main special-purpose IMS disaster recovery software solutions are IBM's IMS Remote Site Recovery (RSR) and E-Net's Remote Recovery Data Facility (RRDF). The most frequently used manual process is facetiously referred to as PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method). (Nov. 2004 z/Journal)

A Look at IBM DB2 UDB V8 Substantial security changes in this release prompted the addition of multilevel security, which provides security at a row level. Customers who need more flexible security can use the new special registers and session variables to provide secure information to views, triggers, stored procedures and User Defined Functions. (Jul. 2004 eServer)

Relational Database Sales Up; IBM DB2 Beats Oracle New license revenue in the global relational database market increased by 5.1 percent last year, as IBM's DB2 database surpassed Oracle for the first time. The improvement in the overall market was due primarily to companies deploying more data warehouses in order to use analytical software to look for ways to cut costs and make business operations more efficient (May 2004 CNET News)

The Morphing Role of DBAs and Developers Recently I ran an editorial that asked about the roles of DBAs and developers. I was specifically asking whether people were seeing the two worlds merging a bit, and whether that was impacting positions and jobs in the marketplace. The response was overwhelming to put it lightly. (Feb. 2004 SQL Server Worldwide User Group)

Architects Of Change IBM calls DB2 UDB for z/OS version 8 "the biggest release in DB2 history." Hours clocked by the DB2 development team during the three-year effort add up to a staggering 1,000 years — and counting. On the on-demand front, v.8 has a number of improvements that tie into the whole notion of being autonomic and self-configuring. (Feb. 2004 DB2 magazine)

Tribe Converging Over the years we’ve seen the object oriented tribe, the application server tribes, the mainframe tribes, and more recently the tribe of the Web services. Strangest of all is that some tribes are refusing to work together. (Nov. 2003 Business Integration Journal)

Take a Load Off: Archive Inactive Data If you're running DB2 on z/OS, DB2 hardware data compression commonly yields about a 50 percent reduction in data size. When using DB2 hardware data compression, be aware of trade-offs that exist. For example, indexes aren't compressed, table space scans can incur significant increases in CPU usage, and compression dictionaries consume DB2 address space memory. (Oct. 2003 DB2 Magazine)

IBM to expand data management platform DB2 Information Integrator already lets businesses access information stored in distributed locations. Project Masala will focus on massive amounts of distributed data, including e-mails and scanned letters. Leo, for Learning Optimiser, learns about relationships between data sets to improve query performance. (Aug. 2003 ComputerWeekly)

Risk is real Visualize two circles sitting side by side. One circle represents operational and transactional elements such as ERP, CRM and mainframe data. The other circle represents a snapshot of data -- that is the data warehouse or analytical sphere. As these two circles move to partially overlap, the real-time enterprise appears. It is the frequency of the refresh of the analytical snapshot that defines the amount of real-time involved. (Aug. 2003 Application Development Trends)

DB2 UDB Server for z/OS Version 8: Functions & Features DB2 Version 8 represesnts the largest feature and function release in DB2 history. With Version 8, DB2 continues to focus on and extend its performance, continuous availability, and scalability by breaking through various large database limits and fully leveraging the new z/OS and zSeries architecture. (Jul. 2003 zJournal)

IBM targets user base with DB2 enhancements DB2 v8 for z/OS will have more buffer pools in memory to improve performance as well as the ability to make changes to the data schemas without having to bring the system down. Another feature lets administrators recover previous data in the memory by rolling back the log. (May 2003 ComputerWeekly)

DB2 Programs vs. Utilities Utilities aren't just for DBAs anymore. Programmers face tight schedules to deliver very large and highly available application systems. Taking advantage of utility functions as part of the overall system design makes it easier to meet those challenges. (Apr. 2003 DB2 Magazine)

World’s Most Heavily Used Databases Increase Workload by 50% since 2001 The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, 51,448 tps, achieved the highest workload figure, All Environments, for transaction processing systems. The implementation uses CA-Datacom, an IBM eServer zSeries system and Hitachi storage devices. Customs also captured the top position in the 2001 survey program, when it reported a rate of 26,655 tps. (Feb. 2004 Winter Corp)

DB2 failure prompts bank to set up extra disaster recovery Based on our experience with DB2, we have decided to develop asynchronous-based mirroring to our availability centre. Synchronised mirroring involves writing data to two disc subsystems simultaneously. With asynchronous mirroring, it is necessary to wait for the disc to flag that the data has been successfully copied over before it can be used. (Apr. 2003 ComputerWeekly)

IBM DB2 bugs take bank systems down for four days Thee first software error in DB2 database software had existed in all similar installations since 1997, without IBM’s knowledge. The second software error delayed the recovery process, and a third error on the system prevented recovery jobs from being run simultaneously. Yet another software bug stopped the corrected data from being reloaded back into the databases. (Apr. 2003 ComputerWeekly)

Relational databases: The inspiration behind the theory Prior to the relational system, all data was stored with each record in one large table. This required redundant data and produced large files. Relational theory was created when memory was expensive and computers required a lot of physical space. Obviously those problems no longer exist, so why bother with relational data models now? (Mar. 2003 builder.com)

Venerable IMS still attracts tools Far from being an historical footnote, the venerable mainframe-based IMS software from IBM is still in use at more than 95% of Fortune 1000 companies. Interestingly enough, that even though it is legacy, there are still quite a few large, large customers that run a lot of legacy IMS applications that relate to DB2. (Mar. 2003 Application Development Trends)

How to know when it's time to COMMIT On some platforms, the programmer must understand that COMMIT logic must be incorporated into the code. And as more and more online utilities are developed, programs must be well behaved to allow the concurrently running utilities to be successful. Programs (even read-only ones) that don't do COMMITs are the scourge of online utilities. (Feb. 2003 DB2 Magazine)

Go Ahead, COMMIT On A Read Many people working with DB2 for z/OS or OS/390 believe that it's not necessary to COMMIT on a read-only access. COMMIT releases claims, and claims can be the cause of reduced availability. (Nov. 2002 DB2 Magazine)

A SMARTer DB2 The DB2 SMART project aims to create technology for reducing human intervention and cost in DB2 operation. System management features in DB2 for z/OS include automatic sort technique selection, automatic storage pool contraction in the main DB2 address space, and adaptive buffer management. (Nov. 2002 DB2 magazine)

Gartner OLTP numbers rank winners in server arena What the latest OLTP platform study shows is that, at least as far as technologies are concerned, the venerable IBM mainframe is still the system to beat - but the high-end Unix servers are catching up. The zSeries 900 had a high rating for technology, a relatively low rating for market momentum and a decent rating for business practice. (Oct. 2002 The Register)

Creating DB2 Java Stored Procedures on z/OS Stored procedures can be written in any language supported by the database server, including C, C++, COBOL, PL/I, S/390* Assembler, REXX, procedural SQL and Java. This article shows you the advantages of using the SPB to create and run interpreted Java stored procedures on DB2 UDB for OS/390 and z/OS V7. (Sep. 2002 eServer Magazine)

Ellison touts Oracle Linux clustering Oracle, via its clustering technology, wants Linux to be faster, cheaper, more reliable and more secure than IBM mainframes. He showed a slide that said a 32-processor Linux cluster running Intel machines costs about $350,000 while an IBM mainframe with comparable performance costs $14.8 million. (Aug. 2002 InfoWorld)

Arm Yourself Against Performance Erosion Educating yourself may seem like a luxury (and odd advice for improving performance), but it's critical. If you don't understand the principles and architecture behind the version of DB2 you're using, you'll have a hard time with problem analysis. DB2 has changed dramatically in the last few versions. New features include a Control Center, Java database connectivity, and WLM-managed stored procedures. (Aug. 2002 DB2 magazine)

Data management gets it together There are two general approaches to data management: Oracle's centralized philosophy and IBM's federated data style. Federation is about enabling middleware to reach out and touch data from a variety of sources. In Oracle's centralized management all of a company's data resides in an Oracle database from which it can be easily managed. (Apr. 2001 InfoWorld)