Db2 11 for z/OS End of Service Date Extended!

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about Db2 11 for z/OS End of Support Coming This Year (2020)... but that was before the global COVID-19 pandemic swooped in and changed everything!

If you check out that earlier post, you'll even see that I made the comment that the "date appears to be a firm one... don't bet on IBM extending it." Well, that would have been a bad bet! And that is another reason why it is not a good idea to predict the future (even when you hear the prediction from a credible source).

Yes, IBM has extended the end of service (EOS) for Db2 11 for z/OS by 6 months... from September 30, 2020, to next year, March 31, 2021. They furthermore state that they expect it to be a one-time adjustment (but I'm not going to predict the future this time).

You can find the revised EOS terms here.

Regardless of the extension, it still makes sense to start planning your migration to Db2 12 for z/OS now. Actually, with the slowdown in many corporations due to the pandemic, your DBAs and systems programmers might have some time to do this now.

Keep in mind that Db2 11 was made generally available way back on October 25, 2013, 7 years ago. This is an eternity in the world of enterprise software. So it is nice to have more wiggle room, but don't use it to delay further... start your planning now (if you haven't already).

A Condensed 35-Year History of DB2 for z/OS (...and Db2 for z/OS)

Let's go back in time... over three decades ago... back to the wild and woolly 1980s! And watch our favorite DBMS, DB2, grow up over time.

DB2 Version 1 Release 1 was announced on June 7, 1983, and it became generally available on Tuesday, April 2, 1985. I wonder if it was ready on April 1st but not released because of April Fool’s Day? Initial DB2 development focused on the basics of making a relational DBMS work. Early releases of DB2 were viewed by many as an “information center” DBMS, not for production workloads, like IMS was.

Version 1 Release 2 was announced on February 4, 1986 and was released for general availability a month later on March 7, 1986. Can you imagine waiting only a month for a new release of DB2 these days? But that is how it happened back then. Same thing for Version 1 Release 3, which was announced on May 19, 1987 and became GA on June 26, 1987. DB2 V1R3 saw the introduction of DATE data types.

You might notice that IBM delivered “releases” of DB2 back in the 1980s, whereas today (and ever since V3) there have only been versions. Versions are major changes, whereas releases are not quite as significant as a version.

Version 2 Release 1 was announced in April 1988 and delivered in September 1988. Here we start to see the gap widening again between announcement and delivery. V2R1 was a significant release in the history of DB2, a bellwether of sorts for when DB2 began to be viewed as capable of supporting mission-critical, transaction processing workloads. Not only did V2R1 provide significant performance enhancements but it also signaled the introduction of declarative Referential Integrity (RI) constraints.

No sooner than V2R1 became GA than IBM announced Version 2 Release 2 on October 4, 1988. But it was not until a year later that it became generally available on September 23, 1988. DB2 V2R2 again bolstered performance in many ways. It also saw the introduction of distributed database support (private protocol) across MVS systems.

Version 2 Release 3 was announced on September 5, 1990, and became generally available on October 25, 1991. Two very significant features were added in V2R3: segmented table spaces and packages. Segmented table spaces quickly became a de facto standard and packages made DB2 application programs easier to support. DB2 V2R3 is also the version that beefed up distributed support with Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA).

Along comes DB2 Version 3, announced in November 1993 and GA in December 1993. Now it may look like things sped up again here, but not really. This is when the early support program for DB2 started. Early support was announced in March 1993 and delivered to customers in June 1993. V3 greatly expanded the number of buffer pool options available (from 5 pools to 80), and many advances were made for DB2 to take better advantage of the System 390 environment, including support for hardware-assisted compression and hiperpools. It was also V3 that introduced I/O parallelism for the first time.

Version 4 signaled another significant milestone in the history of DB2. It was highlighted by the introduction of Type 2 indexes, which removed the need to lock index pages (or subpages, now obsolete). Prior to V4, index locking was a particularly thorny performance problem that vexed many shops. Data Sharing made its debut in V4, too, and with it, DB2 achieved new heights of scalability and availability allowing users to upgrade without an outage and to add new subsystems to a group “on the fly.” DB2 V4 also introduced stored procedures, as well as CP parallelism.

In June 1997 DB2 Version 5 became generally available. It was the first DB2 version to be referred to as DB2 for OS/390 (previously it was DB2 for MVS). Not as significant as V4, we see the trend of even-numbered releases being bigger and more significant than odd-numbered releases (of course, that is just my opinion). V5 was touted by IBM as the e-business and BI version. It included Sysplex parallelism, prepared statement caching, reoptimization, online REORG, and conformance to the SQL-92 standard.

Version 6 brings us to 1999 and the introduction of the Universal Database term to the DB2 moniker. The “official” name of the product became DB2 Universal Database for OS/390. And the Release Guide swelled to over 600 pages! Six categories of improvements were introduced with V6 spanning object-relational extensions, network computing, performance and availability, capacity improvements, data sharing enhancements, and user productivity. The biggest of the new features were SQLJ, inline statistics, triggers, large objects (LOBs), user-defined functions, and distinct types.

Version 6 is also somewhat unique in that there was this “thing” typically referred to as the V6 refresh. It added functionality to DB2 without there being a new release or version. The new functionality in the refresh included SAVEPOINTs, identity columns, declared temporary tables, and performance enhancements (including star join).

March 2001 brings us to DB2 Version 7, another “smaller” version of DB2. Developed and released around the time of the Year 2000 hubbub, it offered much-improved utilities and some nice new SQL functionality including scrollable cursors, limited FETCH, and row expressions. Unicode support was also introduced in Db2 V7.

DB2 Version 8 followed, but not immediately. IBM took advantage of Y2K and the general desire of shops to avoid change during this period to take its time and deliver the most significant and feature-laden version of DB2 ever. V8 had more new lines of code than DB2 V1R1 had total lines of code!

With DB2 9 for z/OS, we drop the “V” from the name. Is that in response to Oracle’s naming conventions? Well, we do add a space between the DB2 and the version number because we don’t want to talk about DB-twenty-nine! A lot of great new functionality comes with DB2 9 including additional database definition on demand capabilities, binary data types, and a lot of new SQL capabilities including OLAP functions and EXCEPT/INTERSECT. But probably the biggest new feature is pureXML, which allows you to store DB2 data as native XML. The XML is stored natively as a new data type that can be searched and analyzed without the need to reformat it. The approach was novel in that it  supports native XML, basically enabling dual storage engines.

And that brings us to DB2 10 for z/OS. This version of DB2 was built to take advantage of many zEnterprise (the latest new mainframe at the time) features to deliver scalability. Examples include improved compression, cache optimization, blades for running the Smart Analytics Optimizer, etc. 

Additional capabilities included many performance improvements (BIND, IN-list, utilities, etc.), hash organized table spaces, high-performance DBATs (DDF threads) forced to use RELEASE COMMIT, parallel index updating, efficient caching of dynamic SQL with literals, temporal data support, safe query optimization, improved access path hints, access to currently committed data, new TIMESTAMP precision and time zones, and buffer pool options for pinning objects in memory.

In October 2013 we got another new version, DB2 11 for z/OS. Click on that link if you want all the details, but some highlights included transparent archiving, global variables, improved SQL PL, APREUSE(WARN), significant utility improvements, DROP COLUMN support, and JSON support with IBM BigInsights.

And that brings us to the present day, with DB2 12 for z/OS as the current (and soon to be only) supported version of Db2. Released for general availability in October 2016, DB2 12 for z/OS abandons the traditional new release cycle that IBM has followed for decades, adopting a new continuous delivery model. New functionality is now delivered in Function Levels (FLs) that are easily applied and delivered much more rapidly than in the past. Indeed, the current Db2 function level is FL506, which means there have been 6 new function levels added since 2016.

Version 12 brought with it a plethora of new capabilities including virtual storage enhancements, optimization improvements, and improved control over the introduction of new SQL capabilities. DB2 12 for z/OS delivered many improvements for both application development and database administration. Examples of new application capabilities include:

• Additional support for triggers, arrays, global variables, pureXML, and JSON
• MERGE statement enhancements
• SQL pagination support
• Support for Unicode columns in an EBCDIC table
• Piece-wise deletion of data
• Support for temporal referential constraint
• More flexibility in defining application periods for temporal tables
• PERCENTILE function support
• Resource limits for static SQL statements
• Db2 REST services improve efficiency and security
• DevOps with Db2: Automated deployment of applications with IBM UrbanCode Deploy

Examples of new DBA and SYSADM capabilities include:

• Installation or migration without requiring SYSADM
• Improved availability when altering index compression
• Online schema enhancements
• Improved catalog availability
• Object ownership transfer
• Improved data validation after running DSN1COPY
• Automatic start of profiles at Db2 start
• Increased partition sizes and simplified partition management for partition-by-range table spaces with relative page numbering
• Ability to add partitions between existing logical partitions
• UNLOAD privilege for the UNLOAD utility
• Temporal versioning for Db2 catalog tables
• Statistics collection enhancements for SQL performance    

Of course, these are just some of the V12 improvements; there are many more (as well as all of the Function Level improvements)!

Then sometime in the middle of 2017, IBM decided to change the name of DB2 by making the uppercase B a lowercase b. So now the name of our beloved DBMS is Db2. Nobody has been able to explain to me what the benefit of this was, so don’t ask me!

The Bottom Line

I worked with DB2 way back in its Version 1 days, and I’ve enjoyed watching DB2 grow over its first 35 years. Of course, we did not cover every new feature and capability of each version and release, only the highlights. Perhaps this journey back through time will help you to remember when you jumped on board with Db2 and relational database technology. I am happy to have been associated with Db2 (and DB2) for its first 35 years and I look forward to many more years of working with Db2… 

IBM DB2 11 Tools and Utilities: Delivering timely value to your business

Migrating to any new software release can be a lot easier when you are familiar with new features prior to deployment. So it stands to reason that you should familiarize yourself with new DB2 functionality before you try to migrate your environment to a new version. This training can take the form of:

• Reading the DB2 manuals, especially the What’s New manual and the Technical Overview redbook that typically comes out with each new version of DB2
• Attending presentations on the new release, whether online, at user groups, or even at IDUG or IBM Insight (which used to be the IOD conference)
• Formal training from IBM or other sources

But the bottom line is that you need to educate yourself in advance of migrating to any new version of DB2... Otherwise, you may not be ready to move to the new version on a schedule that fits your business needs.

With IBM DB2 11 for z/OS, you can have a smoother migration process that also enables you to deploy key applications faster. New features and capabilities, both within DB2 11 and the tools and utilities that support DB2 can make migration easier.

And, of course, DB2 11 for z/OS comes with out-of the box cost savings and features that allow you to do more with business-critical analytics and applications. But are your DB2 Tools and DB2 Utilities ready to provide you complete exploitation or support? Do you know the difference?

Join me on June 10, 2014 as I deliver a webcast on DB2 11 for z/OS Tools and Utilities on behalf of IBM. During this informative webinar I will take you through some of the key features in DB2 11 and the importance of timely support for these features by your DB2 tools and utilities. I’ll expose some of the new capabilities of IBM’s tools and utilities for DB2 and I’ll also share ways to make your DB2 11 migration simpler, safer and faster.

So register today at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/webcast/10jun/

And I’ll see you in June!

IBM Information on Demand 2013, Monday

Hello everybody, and welcome to my daily blogging from the IOD conference. Today (Monday, 11/4) was my first day at the conference and it started off with a high octane general session. Well, actually, that's not entirely accurate. It started off with a nice (somewhat less than healthy) breakfast and a lot of coffee. But right after that was the general session.

The session was emceed by Jake Porway, who bills himself as a Data Scientist. He is also a National Geographic host and the founder of DataKind. Porway extolled the virtues of using Big Data for the greater good. Porway says that data is personal and it touches our lives in multiple ways. He started off by talking about the "dark ages" which to Porway meant the early 2000s, before the days of Netflix, back when (horror of horrors) we all went to Blockbuster to rent movies... But today we can access almost all of our entertainment right over the Internet from the comfort of our sofa (except for those brave few who still trudge out to a red box).

From there Porway went on to discuss how data scientists working in small teams can make a world of difference by using their analytical skills to change the world for the better. Porway challenged the audience by asking us "Have you thought about how you might use data to change the world for the better?" And then he went on to describe how data can be instrumental in helping to solve world problems like improving the quality of drinking water, reducing poverty and improving education.

Indeed, Porway said that he views data scientists as "today's superheroes."

Porway the introduced Robert LeBlanc, IBM Sr. Vice President for Middleware Software. LeBlanc's primary message was about the four technologies that define the smarter enterprise: cloud, mobile, social and Big Data analytics.

LeBlanc stated that the amount of unstructured data has changed the way we think, work, and live. And he summed it up rather succinctly by remarking that we used to be valuable for what we know, but now we are more valuable for what we share.

Some of IBM's customers, including representatives from Nationwide and Centerpoint Energy took the stage to explain how they had transformed their business using IBM Big Data and analytics solutions.

I think the quote that summed up the general session for me was that only 1 in 5 organizations spend more than 50 percent of their IT budget on new projects. With analytics, perhaps that can change!

The next couple of sessions I attended covered the new features of DB2 11 for z/OS, which most of you know was released by IBM for GA on October 25, 2013. I've written about DB2 11 on this blog before, so I won't really go over a lot of those sessions here. Suffice it to say, IBM has delivered some great new features and functionality in this next new release of DB2, and they are already starting to plan for the next one!

I ended the day at the System z Rocks the Mainframe event hosted by IBM at the House of Blues. A good time was had by one and all there as the band rocked the house, some brave attendees jumped up on stage to sing with the band, and the open bar kept everyone happy and well lubricated... until we have to get up early tomorrow for Day Two of IOD...

See you tomorrow!


P.S. And for those interested, Adam Gartenberg has documented the IBM announcements from day one of IOD on his blog here.

Information on Demand 2013

Just a short blog today to promote the upcoming IBM Information on Demand conference. This is one of the biggest data-focused conferences of the year - certainly the biggest for users of IBM data management technology. Last year, over 10,000 folks attended the show and expect for that number to grow this year.

The theme of the event is "Big Data. Unique perspectives." so you can expect some timely information from IBM on their Big Data and analytics offerings. And as those of you who are mainframe DB2 users know, IBM launched a new version of DB2 for z/OS - Version 11 - just last week. So there should be a lot of good new information about the latest and greatest version of DB2.

The event is composed of four forums focusing on 1) business analytics, 2) information management, 3) enterprise content management, and 4) business leadership.

I'm looking forward to attending the conference - as well as delivering a presentation on Wednesday, November 6th titled Understanding the rolling four hour average to control DB2 costs.

If you're not planning on being there, you should reconsider! And if you are planning on being there, hunt me down and say "Hi!"

Here is the web page for more information on the Information on Demand 2013 conference.

Say "Hello" to DB2 11 for z/OS

DB2 11 for z/OS Generally Available Today, October 25, 2013

As was announced earlier this month (see press release) Version 11 of DB2 for z/OS is officially available as of today. Even if your company won’t be migrating right away, the sooner you start learning about DB2 11, the better equipped you will be to embrace it when you inevitably must use and support it at your company.

So let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights of this latest and greatest version of our favorite DBMS. As usual, a new version of DB2 delivers a large number of new features, functions, and enhancements, so of course, not every new DB2 11 “thing” will be addressed in today’s blog entry.

Performance Claims

Similar to most recent DB2 versions, IBM boasts of performance improvements that can be achieved by migrating to DB2 11. The claims for DB2 11 from IBM are out-of-the-box savings ranging from 10 percent to 40 percent for different types of query workloads: up to 10 percent for complex OLTP and update intensive batch – up to 40 percent for queries.

As usual, your actual mileage may vary. It all depends upon things like the query itself, number of columns requests, number of partitions that must be accessed, indexing, and on and on. So even though it looks like performance gets better in DB2 11, take these estimates with a grain of salt.

The standard operating procedure of rebinding to achieve the best results still applies. And, of course, if you use the new features of DB2 11 IBM claims that you can achieve additional performance improvements.

DB2 11 also offers improved synergy with the latest mainframe hardware, the zEC12. For example, FLASH Express and pageable 1MB frames are used for buffer pool control blocks and DB2 executable code. So keep in mind that getting to the latest hardware can help out your DB2 performance and operation!

Programmer Features

Let’s move along and take a look at some of the great new features for building applications offered up by DB2 11. There are a slew of new SQL and analytical capabilities in the new release, including: 

• Global variables – which can be used to pass data from program to program without the need to put data into a DB2 table
• Improved SQLPL functionality, including an array data type which makes SQLPL more computationally complete and simplifies coding SQL stored procedures.
• Alias support for sequence objects.
• Improvements to Declared Global Temporary Tables (DGTTs) including the ability to create NOT LOGGED DBTTs and the ability to use RELEASE DEALLOCATE for SQL statements written against DGTTs.
• SQL Compatibility feature which can be used to minimize the impact of new version changes on existing applications.Support for views on temporal data. 
• SQL Grouping Sets, including Rollup, Cube
• XML enhancements including XQuery support, XMLMODIFY for improved updating of XML nodes, and improved validation of XML documents.

The BIND and REBIND enhancements made in DB2 11 are important to note here, too. Since BIND and REBIND spans application programming and database administration, I’ll talk about here at the end of the Programming Features section and right before we move on to talk about DBA features.

The first new capability is the addition of the APREUSE(WARN) parameter. Before we learn about the new feature, let’s backtrack for a moment to talk about the current (DB2 10) capabilities of the APREUSE parameter. There are currently two options:

• APREUSE(NONE): DB2 will not try to reuse previous access paths for statements in the package. (default value)
• APREUSE(ERROR): DB2 tries to reuse previous access paths for SQL statements in the package. If the access paths cannot be reused, the operation fails and no new package is created.

So you can either not try to reuse or try to reuse, and if you can’t reuse when you try to, you fail. Obviously, a third, more palatable choice was needed. And DB2 11 adds this third option.

• APREUSE(WARN): DB2 tries to reuse previous access paths for SQL statements in the package, but the bind or rebind is not prevented when they cannot be reused. Instead, DB2 generates a new access path for that SQL statement.

So you can think of APREUSE(ERROR) as functioning on a package boundary, whereas APREUSE(WARN) functions on a statement boundary.

DBA and Other Technical Features

There are also a slew of new in-depth technical and DBA-related features in DB2 11. Probably the most important, and one that impacts developers too, is transparent archiving using DB2’s temporal capabilities first introduced in DB2 10.

Basically, if you know how to set up SYSTEM time temporal tables, setting up transparent archiving will be a breeze. You create both the table and the archive table and then associate the two. This is done by means of the ENABLE ARCHIVE USE clause. DB2 is aware of the connection between the operational table and the archive table, so any data that is deleted will be moved to the archive table.

Unlike SYSTEM time, only deleted data is moved to the archive table. There is a new system defined global variable MOVE_TO_ARCHIVE to control the ability to DELETE data without archiving it, should you need to do so.

Of course, there are more details to learn about this capability, but remember, we are just touching on the highlights today!

Another notable feature that will interest many DBAs is the ability to use SQL to query more DB2 Directory tables. The list of DB2 Directory tables which now can be accessed via SQL includes:

• SYSIBM.DBDR
• SYSIBM.SCTR
• SYSIBM.SPTR
• SYSIBM.SYSLGRNX
• SYSIBM.SYSUTIL

Another regular area of improvement for new DB2 version is enhanced IBM DB2 Utilities, and DB2 11 is no exception to the rule. DB2 11 brings the following improvements:

• REORG – automated mapping tables (where DB2 takes care of the allocation and removal of the mapping table during a SHRLEVEL CHANGE reorganization), online support for REORG REBALANCE, automatic cleanup of empty partitions for PBG table spaces, LISTPARTS for controlling parallelism, and improved switch phase processing.
• RUNSTATS – additional zIIP processing, RESET ACCESSPATH capability to reset existing statistics, and improved inline statistics gathering in other utilities.
• LOAD – additional zIIP processing, multiple partitions can be loaded in parallel using a single SYSREC and support for extended RBA LRSN.
• REPAIR – new REPAIR CATALOG capability to find and correct for discrepancies between the DB2 Catalog and database objects.
• DSNACCOX – performance improvements

Additionally, there is a new command to externalize Real Time Statistics. You can use ACCESS DATABASE … MODE(STATS) instead of stopping and starting a database object or forcing a system checkpoint to externalize RTS.

DB2 11 also delivers a bevy of new security-related enhancements, including:

• Better coordination between DB2 and RACF, including new installation parameters (AUTHEXIT_CHECK and AUTHECIT_CACHEREFRESH) and the ability for DB2 to capture event notifications from RACF
• New PROGAUTH bind plan option to ensure the program is authorized to use the plan.
• The ability to create MASKs and PERMISSIONs on archive tables and archive-enabled tables
• Column masking restrictions are removed for GROUP BY and DISTINCT processing

Online schema changes are still being introduced to new version of DB2 amd DB2 11 offers up some nice functionality in this realm. Perhaps the most interesting new capability is DROP COLUMN. Dropping a column from an existing table has always been a difficult task requiring dropping and recreating the table (and all related objects and security), so most DBAs just left unused and unneeded columns in the table. This can cause confusion and data integrity issues if the columns are used by programs and end users. Now, DROP COLUMN can be used (as long as the table is in a UTS). Of course, there are some other restrictions on its use, but this capability may help many DBAs clean up unused columns in DB2 tables.

An additional online schema change capability in DB2 11 is support for online altering of limit keys, which enables DBAs to change the limit keys for a partitioned table space without impacting data availability.

Finally, in terms of online schema change, we have an improvement to operational administration for deferred schema changes. DB2 11 provides improved recovery for deferred schema changes. With DB2 10, when the REORG begins to materialize pending change it is no longer possible to perform a recovery to a prior point in time. DB2 11 removes this restriction, allowing recovery to any valid prior point.

In terms of Buffer Pool enhancements, DB2 11 offers up the new 2GB frame size for very large BP requirements.

In terms of Data Sharing enhancements, DB2 11 offers faster CASTOUT, improved RESTART LIGHT capability, and automatic recovery of all pages in LPL during a DB2 restart.

Analytics and Big Data Features

There are also a lot of features added to DB2 11 to support Big Data and analytical processing. Probably the biggest is the ability to support Hadoop access. If you don’t know what Hadoop is, this is not the place to learn about that. Instead, check out this link.

Anyway, DB2 11 can be used to enable applications to easily and efficiently access Hadoop data sources. This is done via the generic table UDF capability in DB2 11. Using this feature you can create a variable shape of UDF output table.

This capability allows access to BigInsights, which is IBM’s Hadoop-based platform for Big Data. As such, you can use JSON to access Hadoop data via DB2 using the UDF supplied by IBM BigInsights.

DB2 11 also adds new SQL analytical extensions, including:

• GROUPING SETS can be used for GROUP BY operations to enable multiple grouping clauses to be specified in a single statement.
• ROLLUP can be used to aggregate values along a dimension hierarchy. In addition to aggregation along the dimensions a grand total is produced. Multiple ROLLUPs can be coded in a single query to produce multidimensional hierarchies in a result set.
• CUBE can be used to aggregate data based on columns from multiple dimensions. You can think of it like a cross tabulation.

And finally, new version (V3) of IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) is part of the mix, too. IDAA V3 brings about improvements such as:

• The ability to store 1.3 PB of data
• Change Data Capture support to capture changes to DB2 data and propagate them to IDAA as they happen
• Additional SQL function support for IDAA queries (including SUBSTRING, among others, and additional OLAP functions).
• Work Load Manager integration

Other "Stuff"

Of course, there are additional features and functionality being introduced with DB2 11 for z/OS. A blog entry of this nature on the day of GA cannot exhaustively cover everything. That being said, two additional areas are worth noting.

• Extended log record addressing – increases the size of the RBA and LRSN from 6 bytes to 10 bytes. This avoids the outage that is required if the amount of log records accumulated exhausts the capability of DB2 to create new RBAs or LRSNs. To move to the new extended log record addressing requires converting your BSDSs.
• DRDA enhancements – including improved client info properties, new FORCE option to cancel distributed threads, and multiple performance related improvements.

Summary

DB2 11 for z/OS brings with it a bevy of interesting and useful new features. They range the gamut from development to administration to performance to integration with Big Data. Now that DB2 11 is out in the field and available for organizations to start using it, the time has come for all DB2 users to take some time to learn what DB2 11 can do.