Now if you were a good attendee at the IOD (and paid attention to the freebies!), you probably got a free copy of the great little book „DB2 11: „The Database for Big Data & Analytics“.
If you did not get a copy at the IOD you can download a free electronic copy here.
On page 30 there is the following text:
| “Implementation of the expanded RBA/LRSN formats is optional but highly recommended as DB2 11 will use 10-byte values internally when in NFM, and there will be a small performance penalty for converting these to old Format” |
Italics added by me of course!
Now this caused a couple of questions at the IOD as how to manage a REORG of the whole world. So my newsletter this month is to suggest a way to do this without just REORGing everything from DB 0 to DB Z!
How to manage a REORG without just REORGing everything from DB0 to DBZ ?
1) Be on *usage* metric
Start with your “known suspects” list – Every shop has a top ten list of SQLs normally based on CPU. What you must do is change this list to not be on CPU but on *usage*. The trick is how to actually do this! Well, I would start with the average executes per hour for all objects (To get this metric you must EXPLAIN or have the EXPLAIN data). Obviously the objects at the top of this list should be REORGed first!
2) 50 Reorgs a night
Get your system automation or DB2 Database Maintenance system to use the above data to drive, say, 50 Reorgs a night *purely* based on usage metrics
3) Wait
4) You’re done when no more REORGs are triggered for this metric
Of course it would be easier if all the data was there in front of you but then you would need our SQL WorkLoadExpert (WLX) to get the usage metrics which is, of course, linked to our RealTime DBAExpert (RTDX) which takes care of the REORGs but I digress…
SYSCOPY’s handling
What is also “interesting” is the way SYSCOPY handles all of this… If you select the LENGTH of the START_RBA before the CATENFM job has REORGed SYSCOPY you will get 6 back. After the CATENFM has done SYSCOPY you then get 10 back. This way your “home grown” systems can “know” if the RBA is 6 or 10 Bytes…
SELECT LENGTH(START_RBA) FROM SYSIBM.SYSCOPY FETCH FIRST 1 ROW ONLY ;
RBA & LRSN extensions
The next interesting point is that a RBA has been extended on the left and a LRSN has been extended on the left *and* the right. So you need to be aware of whether or not the row was written in a data-sharing environment. Probably not that interesting to most people as their shops are one or the other and not normally a mix, but for our software we must know what is in the START_RBA so we use a little CASE to do the work for us if running in DB2 V8, 9 or 10:
CASE WHEN GROUP_MEMBER > ' '
THEN
SUBSTR(X'00' CONCAT START_RBA CONCAT X'000000' , 1 , 10)
ELSE
SUBSTR(X'00000000' CONCAT START_RBA , 1 , 10)
END
The last thing I will mention this month is the SYSLGRNX format has changed which might catch a few people out if you are using CI style programs to read it! The DB2 11 NFM version is now in a segmented space and has the extended trailer so beware!
As usual any questions or comments are welcome,
TTFN Roy Boxwell
Senior Software Architect