In early October of this year, Perry Shindle, a DB2 for z/OS Specialist working at PennDOT, gave a presentation at the annual IBM DB2 Data Tech Summit held in San Jose, CA. The IBM Data Tech Summit is a technical-oriented conference that focuses on IBM’s DB2 database management software, as well as IBM’s DB2 Tools software. Perry’s presentation was entitled “Beginner’s Guide to Db2 for z/OS Autonomics”. This year’s conference was attended by an estimated 250 IBM DB2 customers.
Perry leads a project at PennDOT to implement IBM’s DB2 autonomics solution to make all of their DB2 environments as self-managing as possible. With many DB2 large mission-critical application databases and a limited DBA staff, it is important for PennDOT to automate regular database ‘housekeeping’ maintenance work as much as possible.
PennDOT committed themselves as an early adopter of IBM’s DB2 autonomics solution, and has been working closely with IBM and their partner Rocket Software to implement and enhance IBM’s autonomic solution since 2015. PennDOT continues to provide valuable customer feedback to both IBM and Rocket Software as to how their autonomics solution can be improved. To IBM’s credit, many of our suggestions have already been incorporated into the software through the maintenance stream, and PennDOT has updated their software to take advantage of these new features.
In December 2017, PennDOT participated in a beta test program for a new piece of functionality within the DB2 Autonomics Solution called “Smarter Reorg Recommendations”. This functionality enhances existing DB2 Tooling software to collect database performance data on a scheduled basis. The collected performance data is then analyzed to determine if database performance could be improved if a DB2 reorg utility is run against a DB2 table or index. If database performance would not be improved, then the DB2 Reorg, that would normally be executed, could be totally avoided. This functionality has helped to greatly reduce the weekend database maintenance window at PennDOT. Specifically, since they first implemented DB2 autonomics, the normal weekend DB2 maintenance window has decreased significantly, from 4 hours down to 15 minutes!
If you are interested in reading more about PennDOT’s journey to DB2 autonomics, please take a look at a case study paper published by IBM that can be found at: https://www.ibm.