Category Archives: Db2 Temporal Data Management

DB2 LUW Exam 611 – Holiday reading

April 5, 2013 1:30 am / Leave a Comment /

This is a short post and I hope to get back into blogging proper once I am back from my hols. Its been a while since I last posted but seen as though we are on holiday and it is currently to hot to move I thought I would do a post. My holiday reading generally consists of technical manuals, papers , generally interesting stuff about history etc. This holiday has been no different I am currently trying to wade through the only currently IBM published material for the new IBM 611 DB2 LUW DBA Exam.

Preparation guide for DB2 10.1 LUW Exam 611

So this is the view that I currently have most days while trying to wade through the treacle that is this material:
image

This guide can be found here. while I don’t doubt that it is not all very good stuff, and I have to admit that some is bloggable when I get chance there is too much detail when compared to the past offerings from Roger Sanders.

The red, green and purple books offered the right level of detail for the exam but also enough to go off to the info centre and find out all the nitty gritty for yourself if needed. On the other hand IBM have gone the whole hog in this guide and included the whole info centre at 1121 pages giving you too much detail and no indication about what might actually be on the exam!

Too much detail

There are 45 or so pages on temporal tables (p253 – p301) whereas for indexes there are less than 30 (p327 – p351). So does this mean that temporal tables are new so they have devoted a lot more to it as indexes are old and everyone knows about them? Or does it mean that there will be a lot more questions on the topics that have more pages in this guide? Any offers?

I am also sorry to say the style offers no inspiration to carry on. It took me the best part of two days to clear the temporal table section, but I am fully caught up on any sleep I may have needed to catch up on!

Please someone release a less verbose updated version of this guide, like the good old green and purple books.

Posted in: DB2, DB2 Administration, DB2 Temporal Data Management, Exam, IBM, IBM DB2 LUW, Uncategorized / Tagged: , , , , ,

DB2 10 for Linux, UNIX and Windows Bootcamp – Day 2

September 19, 2012 11:53 pm / Leave a Comment /

Today I am sure would have been very informative if I did not have so many production issues to resolve, as I did not get to pay too much attention, bad times. There were more lectures and more labs that I would have loved to take a more active part in, but it was not to be. Below is a high level look at the at what was covered and

DB2 10 for Linux, UNIX and Windows Bootcamp – Day 2 – What have we done – my prospective

DB2 Backup and Recovery

So due to today’s errors I will be part taking in some recovery over the weekend. The first slide is interesting in this section as it was extolling the virtues of using a backup, surely it is a no brainer? The beginning part was a little basic covering concepts of back-up, recovery and logging. Most of the concepts in this talk I already knew about or use every day.

DB2 Storage Optimisation

I did not get to listen to any of this or part take in the lab, but we already make use of storage optimisation and the compression of data it brings. I am excited about the adaptive compression what that will bring. This section from looking at the slides seems to have also had a bit of a sales pitch at the end, well Storage optimisation is a paid for feature!

Adaptive compression looks like it will be a good thing, default on new tables in your V10 DB but in an upgrade it will be an alter statement and a regorg with a dictionary recreation, which may be a little hard to sell to managers if your tables are going to be offline for a while! Apparently we can expect overall storage savings on a single DB of between 50% and 65%, very impressive.

Data Partitioning in DB2

Again I did not get to listen to all of this or part take in the lab, due to the production issues. This again did not have a lot in it that I have not come across, read about or implemented myself. It covered DPF, Range partitioning, MDC tables the ways to combine these three to reduce a theoretical 64 page search to an 4 page and all the rows search, this basically comes down to breaking your data down so much that there is very little searching needed by DB2 and it can find your data very quickly.

DB2 Temporal Data Management

The final topic of the day and again one that I would have liked to take more part in but was unable too. I think this feature will be very good for historical fact tables in a data warehouse and for the normally advertised reason of auditing. The ways in which they work seems reasonably self explanatory, one GOTCHA is that DB2 assumes you want the current data not the “as of” business or system time so watch out in your stored procedures!!



Posted in: Bootcamp, Data Partitioning in DB2, DB2 Administration, DB2 Backup and Recovery, DB2 Built in commands, DB2 built in functions, DB2 Built-in Stored Procedures, DB2 Data Types, DB2 Development, DB2 Storage Optimisation, DB2 Temporal Data Management, IBM DB2 LUW, V10, V9.7 / Tagged: , , , , , ,