IBM Db2 Database Initial Setup

reviewer1715946

Mainframe Technical Manager/Service Integration Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The mainframe environment does not that often require that we have to set up another Db2. If you're creating a brand new Db2 cluster or data sharing group, then there is a bit of work in that.

The IBM manuals for this and our localized documentation assist the engineers and consultants in building a Db2. I don't consider any issues regarding a build of a Db2.

The mainframe environment from a security perspective is one of the key fundamental selling points of the mainframe environment. It is relatively secure assuming that the security people that administer the RackF database, the external security database, are actually configuring it right. Then we deploy role-based access controls. When they're doing this sort of activity database, people would have to liaise with other areas within the infrastructure and support to configure that Db2. Obviously, with any Db2 you need security permissions. They would need to discuss with the storage team how much disc space they're going to need and to discuss with the performance team and capacity team to make sure that they're going to profile that environment. They would need to discuss with the automation team to make sure that the Db2 is shut down when we need to shut the system down and that it's started up properly when the system's reloaded, or if it is in an unplanned activity, that we can restart it in light mode. Furthermore, the automation tool is monitoring that Db2 instance to make sure that it's healthy. Ultimately, there are lots of different teams that would be involved in this.

For the most part, the setup is simple. If somebody wants a new database or schema, we could just quickly do that within that environment. If we need a brand new, separate Db2 environment, that would be more complicated, however, we have the procedures and processes in place for that.

We could have just one systems programmer doing that maintenance. That said, from my perspective, I engage a lot of the teams. Once we've put that maintenance into the development environment and we leave it for a week against one member and leave the other member back level, we would do full performance analysis to see that, with all the transactions that are running there, there's no additional CPU and there's no deterioration in response time and that the Db2 member itself is looking healthy, it's not having any resource shortages, there's no virtual memory or physical memory increases or deviations or anomalies.

We'd engage with the performance and capacity team. I recently engaged with the distributed team, for example, the middleware teams, to make sure that if anything is coming off the web through the web servers, they are aware of our change so that they can monitor and support us.

While it's one person that's doing the change, he might be working with a few junior engineers to do training. We tend to engage a lot of teams across the activity to make sure that everything looks okay and we're not impacting SLAs.

Furthermore, we have a 24 by seven operations team and they do all the operational side. You wouldn't get a Db2 systems programmer in production stopping and starting the Db2. That would be done by the operators.

IBM Db2 Database Reviews

IBM Db2 Database Initial Setup