Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Happy Holidays!

Well, it is that time of year again. The days are shorter and the weather is colder... even if it isn't as cold as normal it is colder than it was in July! And most people are taking the time to celebrate the holiday season. 

Here's wishing each and every one of my readers a happy holiday... regardless of your chosen season to celebrate! Whether you celebrate Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, or just the end of another year on Planet Earth, I'm with you, and celebrating my good fortune, great family and friends, and you, my regular blog readers. I appreciate and thank you all...

This will be the final post of the year (2015) for this blog, but be sure to join me again next year - 2016 - as we continue to examine all aspects of everybody's favorite DBMS... IBM's DB2...

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Easily Convert to Table-Controlled Partitioning

Up through DB2 V8 for z/OS, the only way to control partitioning of DB2 table spaces was by using a clustering index that specified the range of key values for each partition. With V8, though, DB2 adds the ability to specify the partitioning criteria in the CREATE TABLE specification. This is known as table-controlled partitioning and it is the preferred method for creating (non-Universal) partitioned table spaces. With table-controlled partitioning you can cluster on a different column (or set of columns) than you are partitioning on. Furthermore, you can make changes such as dropping a partitioning index or creating a table in a partitioned table space without defining any indexes at all.


But given the long history of DB2, many existing partitioned table spaces are index-controlled. 

Fortunately, there is a quick-and-dirty technique that you can use to easily convert from index-controlled to table-based partitioning. Simply follow these steps:

  • Identify the index-controlled partitioned table space you wish to convert
  • Convert the clustering index on the table to NOT CLUSTER using ALTER INDEX. (Alternately, you could drop the clustering index, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless you no longer need that index at all.)
  • Convert the index back to CLUSTER, again using ALTER INDEX
Voila! DB2 will have converted your table space to table-controlled partitioning.



Note: DB2 will also convert from index-controlled to table-controlled partitioning if you use ALTER TABLE to add a new partition, change a partition boundary, or rotate a partition to last on an index-controlled partitioned table space. But these are more intrusive methods than simply altering the index from clustering to non-clustering and back again.