On my old site I did an post on the SYSPROC.ADMIN_CMD and how you can get it too carry out a runstats of a table. The full list of everything it can do can be found in the IBM DB2 LUW Info center and as the title of this page suggests “ADMIN_CMD procedure – Run administrative commands” it allows you to run administrative tasks that you would normally have to type in manually or use the GUI (Data Studio) for.
Use of SYSPROC.ADMIN_CMD
The command is quite useful in it takes upto a 2Mb string in as a parameter and executes it, it is unuseful in the fact that it has a limited list of commands it will take, e.g. it will not take any of the SIUD (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) statements which should be eveident from the “administrative commands” part of the description. But equally I can think of many occasions that this would be more useful then PREPARE and EXECUTE for running dynamic commands.
The real power of this command in my opionion is that SYSPROC.ADMIN_CMD allows you to create Stored Procedures in DB2 where you would normally create a bash script. This makes your database administration scritpts a lot more protable and give you the ability to create an “Database Maintenace” (DB_MAIN) Schema that is installable as part of a standard set up.
Standard useage is along the lines of:
CALL SYSPROC.ADMIN_CMD('{Command}')The SP can be called by anyone who has permissions on it, but the commands issued through the SP by the user, the user has to be of an appropriate level to run them therefore you cant just have any joe (or joanne) running a backup of the database.
Typical of how I use it is along the lines of
CALL SYSPROC.ADMIN_CMD('RUNSTATS ON TABLE {Schema}.{Table Name} ON ALL COLUMNS AND INDEXES ALL ALLOW WRITE ACCESS')But as you will notice this still requires me to type in a command that would in essence still work at the command line. This brings me onto …..
Future posts
I use it to run things like Runstats, Re-organisations of table and indexes, Exporting and Loading data. In later blog posts I will be looking at how I use this command and how you might be able to as well to run standard, but dynamic administrative commands.