DB2 11 for z/OS Features and Resources

Information overload is the constant at all conferences and the recent European IDUG and US IOD conferences were both tremendous at providing great detailed information.  All the enhancements in DB2 11 for z/OS, DB2 10.5 BLU Acceleration, and all the latest Pure Data systems were detailed at both conferences.
DB2 11 for z/OS has many great new features that will make every DB2 shop better.  The release of DB2 11 for z/OS continues the trend of providing better system manageability, improved application performance, and lower operating costs through its many new and enhanced features.  The DB2 11 for z/OS features list is very long and detailed in many new ebooks, white papers, and presentations that are downloadable through the links and resources highlighted two weeks ago and a new Redbook.

New DB2 11 for z/OS Redbooks.  One of the new DB2 11 for z/OS books that really details the new release is the DB2 11 for z/OS Technical Overview.  The official version is in its legal and final review and should be published later this month.  A draft of this IBM Redbook is now available for download.  Another IBM Redbook that is being finished is the DB2 11 for z/OS Performance Topics Redbook.  It too should be out shortly, and once it is published, I will provide a link.

DB2 11 for z/OS software is ready.  DB2 11 for z/OS is generally available today. While talking to a friend who has been working with it in his test environments through the beta at the recent Information on Demand conference, I discovered he is now getting ready to put this new version into their production environment.  The reason they are aggressive pushing the new DB2 11 for z/OS into production is because of their successful testing of the new DB2 11 for z/OS version, its “out of the box” performance savings, application availability, and utility enhancements.  Also, they are running out of RBAs (relative byte addresses) within their current DB2 system and the DB2 11 for z/OS expands the RBA, eliminating the potential that the DB2 system will run out of RBAs.

As I talked about last week the ALTER table name DROP COLUMN capability and the REORG enhancements will save his shop tremendous storage space and avoid availability issues.  Saving mainframe storage costs, avoiding application downtime, and using less CPU continue to be big value drivers. DB2 11 for z/OS continues to deliver on its promises of improving these crucial metrics.

DB2 11 for z/OS REORG Utility enhancements.  DB2 11 for z/OS REORG has improved its handling of non-partitioning secondary indexes (NPSIs) within the utility processing with subtasks that unload the various NPSI index keys not in the REORG partition scope.  Depending on the REORG utility parameters, these NPSI keys are then handled a couple of different ways, sorted, and ultimately used to build the online REORG shadow index.  Through this new DB2 11 for z/OS REORG utility feature and parameters the rebuild of the NPSIs indexes is considerably more CPU efficient and improves the overall REORG elapsed time..  In some internal IBM DB2 11 for z/OS initial tests it has reduced elapsed time by 55% and overall CPU by 22%.

What is also great about this new DB2 11 for z/OS REORG NPSI feature is that it has been retrofitted by APAR PM55051 to DB2 9 with PTF UK78231 and DB2 10 with PTF UK78229.

This is just a little of the great information I received at both of these conferences.

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