Be Proactive With Your DB2 Performance

Happy New Year!

Be Proactive with your DB2 Performance

Is it?  Well, I know everyone is worried about the economy, but the best way to stay employed is to be proactive.  Proactive is not that difficult it is just being extra helpful and providing extraordinary service.

For example recently helping a client, I was asked to recommend a strategy for the evaluation of a Java web application.  I suggested they use some of the new tools IBM is offering like Data Studio for Developers, Data Studio Administrator and the DB2 Monitoring Console.  They were unfamiliar with the new free version of these tools. After I showed them what can be done we downloaded and got them working in their environment.

Next we unzipped the Java project WAR file and created and imported it into a new project in Data Studio Developer.  Searching quickly through the code with the Data Studio Eclipse facilities we were able to quickly find the SQL statements being used against the database.  Highlighting these statements we were able to use the integrated Data Studio Visual Explain to get the access paths of the modules.

Once we knew the SQL access paths we then one step further into the Visual Explain and noticed that the tables didn’t have any statistics run against them.  To make sure this was the only problem with these SQL statements we wanted to capture a bench mark of the before and after performance.

To capture the performance we downloaded and installed the DB2 Monitoring Console.  This great little PHP front end uses the DB2 stored procedures against the monitoring information to capture a lot of SQL workload information.  It is especially great because it works capturing the Dynamic Statement Cache SQL and its performance metrics.  We ran the SQL and gather the performance metrics along with the capturing the Visual Explain Graph and stats.  Then we ran the RUNSTATs facility against the environment and reran the Visual Explain. The access path changed from a Hybrid Join to a Nested Loop Join, improving SQL response time performance by about 26%.

So being proactive instead of merely recommending a strategy for improving the Java application, I showed them the strategy and also the tools and methodology for improving their performance.  Using these same tools and methods you too can demonstrate and help your shop improve their Java application performance.   By helping others through the performance process they can save time and the company money by reducing CPU demand on your environment.

Be proactive! Everybody likes to save time and money — especially this year!

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Dave Beulke is an internationally recognized DB2 consultant, DB2 trainer and education instructor.  Dave helps his clients improve their strategic direction, dramatically improve DB2 performance and reduce their CPU demand saving millions in their systems, databases and application areas within their mainframe, UNIX and Windows environments.

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