DB2 Health Checks - Part 3

In parts one and two of this series on DB2 health checks, we discussed the importance of regularly checking the health of your DB2 subsystems and applications. We also looked at some of the issues involved in a health check including figuring out the scope of what is to be involved and some of the considerations to ponder as you approach assessing the health of your DB2 environment.

Of course, it is not really feasible to cover all of the components that you might need to address in your health checks in a series of posts in a blog. My true intent here is to get you to understand the importance of regularly checking DB2's health, instead of just plodding along and only making changes when someone complains!

But even though DB2 health checks are important and crucial to the on-going stability of your systems, they can be costly, time-consuming, and valid only for the point in time(s) that you review. But maybe there is something else you can do to attack this problem?

DB2 Offline Analysis

Instead of relying on outside experts to conduct your DB2 health checks you can instead rely on expert system software to provide a reliable, impartial analysis of your DB2 databases and applications. Such as solution is offered by Data Kinetics’ InnovizeIT Offline Analyzer for DB2 for z/OS.

How does InnovizeIT work? Well, similar to a  DB2 health check, the product deploys a two-step process to check the health of your DB2 databases and applications:

1. Collect data about your DB2 environment and ship it to your personal computer
2. Analyze the data and identify issues and potential problems

InnovizeIT is a planning and analysis tool that identifies mainframe DB2 bottleneck and performance degradation problems. DB2 performance and availability metadata is collected on the mainframe and downloaded to a Windows workstation. All of the analysis is performed offline, on the workstation, so there is no use of mainframe resources and no effect on mainframe performance.

Runing the analysis on a PC workstation instead of the mainframe is an important feature in today’s world of cost-cutting and resource management. Most organizations are looking for ways to reduce their mainframe MSU consumption and would not really look too kindly on a big analysis job consuming a lot of mainframe CPU to analyze your DB2 environment. PC resources are frequently idle during off hours, so it makes a lot of sense to run the analysis on those under-utilized resources.

The offline analysis process uses weighted analysis results with targeted and prioritized recommendations for fixing performance problems. The guided assistance InnovizeIT provides enables you to plan corrective actions and protect your budget regardless of static or dynamic SQL use, or variable workload processing.

The results of the analysis are categorized and reported using an easy-to-navigate GUI. You can scan and review the problems identified by the analysis all on your PC workstation. There is no need to go back and forth between the mainframe and the PC because all of the relevant information is captured to allow the DBA to review the results of the analysis. 

The information displayed is context-sensitive depending upon the issue you are investigating and the report you are viewing. You can combine performance metrics from your DB2 performance monitor to add more detail to the analysis and reports. And you can send all of the reports to a spreadsheet for posterity and distribution to all of the DB2 DBAs, developers and, indeed,  anyone interested.

Summary
DB2 health checking should be a standard component of your DB2 database management procedures. Regularly examining your DB2 environment for problematic issues makes good business sense because it can improve performance and reduce costs. And InnovizeIT for DB2 for z/OS is a useful and cost-effective mechanism for conducting regular health checks.

Consider taking a look at it today at http://dkl.com/innovizeit.html

Join the Transaction TweetChat

Today's blog post is an invitation to join me -- and several of my esteemed colleagues -- on Twitter on August 20, 2014 for a TweetChat on transactions.

Now that sentence may have caused some of you to have a couple questions. First of all, what is a TweetChat? Well, a TweetChat is a pre-arranged conversation that happens on Twitter. It is arranged by an organizer (for this one, that would be IBM) and features several invited "experts" to discuss the topic at hand.

The featured guests for this TweetChat are:

• Scott Hayes – @srhayes
• Craig Mullins  @craigmullins
• Kelly Schlamb  @KSchlamb

But everybody can participate. All that you need is a Twitter account and the hashtag, which for this event is #Transactions. You can search for the #Transactions hashtag, and all of the tweets using that hashtag will show up. You can participate in the TweetChat simply by including the hashtag #Transactions in your tweets.

So if you are interested in the conversation topic -- transactions -- be sure to join us and participate in the discussion... or at least just listen in to hear what folks think...

A Short Report from SHARE in Pittsburgh

Today’s blog post will be a short review of SHARE posted directly from the conference floor in Pittsburgh!

What is SHARE

For those of you who are not aware of SHARE, it is an independent, volunteer run association providing enterprise technology professionals with continuous education and training, valuable professional networking and effective industry influence. SHARE has existed for almost 60 years. It was established in 1955 and is the oldest organization of computing professionals.

The group conducts two conferences every year. Earlier in 2014 the first event was held in Anaheim, and this week (the week of August 3^rd) the second annual event is being held in my original hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. Now I’ve been attending SHARE, more regularly in the past than lately, since the 1990’s. But with the event being held in Pittsburgh I just had to participate!

The keynote (or general) session today started up at 8:00 AM. It was titled “Beyond Silicon: Cognition and Much, Much More”  and it was delivered by Dr. Bernard S.Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP, Innovation.  Meyerson delighted the crowd with his entertaining and educational session.

Next up was “Enterprise Computing: The Present and the Future”, an entertaining session that focused on what IBM believes are the four biggest driving trends in IT/computing: cloud, analytics, mobile, and social media. And, indeed, these trends are pervasive and interact with one another to create the infrastructure of most modern development efforts. Bryan Foley Program Director, System z Strategy at IBM delivered the presentation and unloaded a number of interesting stats on the audience, including:

• Mainframe is experiencing 31 percent growth
• Mainframes process 30 billion business transactions daily
• The mainframe is the ultimate virtualized system
• System z is the most heavily instrumented platform in the world
• The mainframe is an excellent platform for analytics because that’s where the data is

Clearly, if you are a mainframer, there is a lot to digest… and a lot to celebrate. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit shared by Foley is that “PC is the new legacy!” He backed this up with a stat claiming that mobile Internet users are projected to surpass PC Internet users in 2015. Interesting, no?

Now those of you that know me know that I am a DB2 guy, but I have not yet attended much DB2 stuff. I sat in on an intro to MQ and I’m currently prepping for my presentation this afternoon – “Ten Breakthroughs That Changed DB2 Forever.”

The presentation is based on a series of articles I wrote a couple years ago, but I am continually tweaking it to keep it up to date and relevant. So even if you’ve read the article, if you are at SHARE and a DB2 person, stop by Room 402 at 3:00PM… and if you’re not here, the articles will have to do!

That's all for now... gotta get back to reviewing my presentation... hope to see you at SHARE this week... or, if not, somewhere else out there in DB2-land!

DB2 Health Checks - Part Two

In the first part of this series on DB2 health checks, DB2 Health Checks - Part One, I discussed the general concept of a health check and their basic importance in terms of maintaining a smooth-running DB2 environment.

Today, I want to briefly look at how DB2 health checks are usually done... if they are done at all.

The Scope of a DB2 Health Check

Some people mistakenly view a DB2 Health Check as being performance-focused only. Yes, performance is an important aspect of a health check -- and I admit that performance is generally the area that causes an organization to undergo the health check process. But the overall health of the DB2 environment needs to be addressed by the health check. In addition to performance-related issues (system, database and application), this can include:

• availability
• fault tolerance
• recoverability
• use of automation
• process review
• documentation
• people skills (DBA, sysprog, development, etc.)

Considerations Before Undergoing a DB2 Health Check

DB2 health checks are important and crucial to the on-going stability of your systems, but there are issues:

• Health checks can be costly (consulting engagements)
• When a consulting company conducts a health check the analysis usually is done off-site, so your DBAs do not learn the techniques used by the consultants as they massage and analyze the data
• Health checks generally are valid for a specific point-in-time and can become obsolete quickly

Conducting DB2 Health Checks

DB2 health checks typically are conducted by IBM personnel, a DB2 consultant, or a larger services firm. The engagement begins with experts/consultants interviewing the DBAs, submitting questionnaires as needed and collecting data from DB2. After collecting the data the consulting team goes off site and analyzes the reams of collected data. There may be intermittent communication between the consulting team and the on-site DBAs to clear up any lingering questions or to clarify things during the analysis phase. After some time (usually a week or more), a report on the health of your DB2 environment, perhaps with some recommendations to implement, is delivered.

What happens next is all up to you. After reading the report you can ignore it, implement some or all of the recommendations, conduct further in-house investigation for the feasibility of implementing the recommendations, or send it along to management for their perusal. But there is a deadline involved. After all, your systems are not static. So the health check report is only as good as the point-in-time for which it was delivered. Time, as it always does, will creep up on you. If you wait too long, the recommendations become stale and you might not be doing the proper thing for your environment by implementing changes based on old information.

Of course, when too much time has gone by after the health check, you could always engage with the services company and consultants again, requiring additional spending.

Is another way? 

Stay tuned, as we'll look at some other options in upcoming installments of this blog series on DB2 health checking...

Happy DBA Day!

Hey everybody, time to celebrate... today, July 25, 2014 is SysAdmin day! For the past 15 years, the last Friday in June has been set aside to recognize the hard work done by System Administrators. This is known as System Administrator Appreciation Day. 

As a DBA, I have regularly co-opted the day to include DBAs because, after all, we are a special type of system administrator -- the system we administer is the DBMS!

So if you are a SysAdmin, DBA, Network Admin, etc. have an extra cup of Joe and a donut or two. Hang up a sign on your cubicle telling people it is SysAdmin Day. And hopefully get a little respect and appreciation for all you do every day of the year!