So I’m obviously biased on this. I’ve been a DB2 DBA for 10 years and believe in DB2 very strongly. Some of my biases against Oracle may be completely unfounded. I’m actually learning Oracle so I can support clients who insist upon using it.… Read the rest
Continue reading »Author: Ember Crooks
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Lead Database Administrator
Ember is always curious and thrives on change. Working in IT provides a lot of that change, but after 18 years developing a top-level expertise on Db2 for mid-range servers and more than 7 years blogging about it, Ember is hungry for new challenges and looks to expand her skill set to the Data Engineering role for Data Science. With in-depth SQL and RDBMS knowledge, Ember shares both posts about her core skill set and her journey into Data Science.
Ember lives in Denver and work from home
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Posts:
DB2 for Commerce IDs
So the easy thing to do on Commerce build is to use your DB2 instance owner for everything related to the database. But that’s not really the best choice. It’s almost always the choice I see when a DBA was not involved with the architecture or build of a Commerce system.… Read the rest
Continue reading »When to Backup your DB2 database
Ok, so there are several good reasons for Backing up your Commerce DB2 database
- After Commerce Instance Creation
- As required by your overall ongoing backup and recovery strategy
- Before a FixPack(DB2 or Commerce) or Feature Pack(Commerce)
- After a FixPack(DB2 or Commerce) or Feature Pack(Commerce)
- Before any task that requires change of a lot of data – such as first time pruning, explicit executions of delete statements or update/insert statements that will affect more than one table.
Build Tip – DB2 Backups
Schedule DB2 backups starting immediately after instance creation – the most common time that restores are needed is during the build process. Of course the most common cause for needing a restore is human error, but that’s something that is important to protect against during build.… Read the rest
Continue reading »Build Tip – Database Naming
Just a quick tip. When building Commerce environments, select a different database name for each environment (Stage, Prod, etc), even if they are on different database servers. This will help you ensure that you(or developers or whoever else accesses the databases) never do something in the wrong environment.… Read the rest
Continue reading »DBClean – Junk OrderItems
So I’m starting out my series on DBClean and data pruning items with the one that I have seen cause the most immediate severe performance impact. I’ve seen this one take a site to its knees within two months of go-live.… Read the rest
Continue reading »dbclean and data pruning intro
One of the most important things for performance of Commerce databases is the proper use of dbclean and data pruning.
It is a simple fact of life for OLTP databases that the same database with less data will perform better. This is especially true of Commerce databases, and even before a site has gone live, I try to have data pruning planned, scripted, and running on a regular basis.… Read the rest
Continue reading »What is a “Volatile” table?
There is a flag that can be set on DB2 tables to mark them as “Volatile”. But not everyone knows what a volatile table is or what this does, so I thought I’d write a quick post on it.
A true volatile table is one that is used only for transient data – data that is put into tables and then quickly removed, meaning that a table marked as volatile could have zero rows one minute, 40,000 the next, and then back to zero.… Read the rest
Continue reading »What to do when DB2 won’t work
This probably falls more in the DB2 newbie category, but I suspect I may have some readers who are DB2 newbies or at least not veterans.
Several years ago (ok, probably more than 5), DB2 seemed to be considering a “Problem Determination Mastery” certification.… Read the rest
Continue reading »The role of the DBA in supporting WebSphere Commerce
I have generally been a bit disappointed on the information coming out of IBM on supporting Commerce databases. I also meet clients who don’t believe they need a dba or that they can hire someone out of college or with minimal database experience to fill such a role.… Read the rest
Continue reading »Data Movement Options for Commerce Databases – Synchronizing Data Between Commerce Environments
So one of the most common questions I get is about moving data between homogenous Commerce databases. Our standard setup includes 4 environments – Dev, QA, Stage, and Prod. Dev/QA are a stagingprop pair, Stage/Prod are a stagingprop pair, and Prod usually has HADR.… Read the rest
Continue reading »Never do runstats on volatile tables
Ok, so everyone will tell you that it doesn’t matter if you do runstats on volatile tables. The volatile flag is supposed to tell DB2 that the statistics are absolutely not correct, and heavily bias db2 to use indexes over table scans.… Read the rest
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