The Problem I often lean on analogies when I speak to non-technical people about technical topics. For example, I would explain database locking as “two kids fighting for the same candy bar”. If you introduce isolation levels into the conversation,…
Loading data into a DB2 database using the LOAD utility has a lot of ins and outs. If a DBA has spent a lot of time working in a database without referential integrity or check constraints, then they may forget…
While this post is specific to WebSphere Commerce, it covers concepts that may apply to tuning other delete statements as well. Using Functions in the Best Place The CLEANCONF table stores the delete statements that are used by DBCLEAN. Most…
The request from the developers was something along the lines of “Help, Ember, this query needs to perform better”. Sometimes the query I’m working on is not one that shows up as a problem from the database administrator’s perspective, but…
Today we are going to talk about some random DB2 features that can’t stand in a blog of their own, but are worth discussing nonetheless. These are tidbits I had discovered during “DB2’s Got Talent” presentations, IDUG conferences, or “Hey,…
Like many applications, WebSphere Commerce puts all tables in USERSPACE1 unless they need larger page sizes. This actually works just fine for smaller and midrange implementations, but we have about one build a year that requires something else – either…
Go-lives bring all kinds of opportunities to find problem SQL. A new site going live or a new site design going live can put a completely different load of SQL on a database. Depending on the level of load testing…
I don’t often make changes to existing tables. The WebSphere Commerce database comes with defintions in place. We make customizations that are largely adding columns or adding tables or adding indexes. It is pretty rare that we have to alter…
I work on a team of DBAs, and we will frequently talk through an issue together to find the root cause. We are all capable of getting there on our own, but sometimes we realize that we’re not seeing something…
This post is specific to WebSphere Commerce. One of the most frequent things I do is to look up whether a table is a part of stagingprop. When to Check The most obvious time to check is when someone asks…
This post is specific to WebSphere Commerce. I ran into a new stagingprop failure today(which doesn’t happen all that often anymore), and it taught me something about custom staging triggers, too. What this Error Looks Like Stagingprop fails, and a…
One of my most popular posts that’s specific to WebSphere Commerce is The 10 Commerce Tables You Should Be Familiar With. This is an updated version of that post, since the preferred method of dealing with attributes has changed. As…