
Database servers these days sometimes have a profusion of IP Addresses. IP V4, V6, management networks, and Virtual IP addresses all add to the ways applications connect in to a database server. I ran into an issue recently where I…

Some of my clients, instead of engaging me for day-to-day support, engage me for expert assistance only when it all really hits the fan. This issue occurred for one of those clients, who had other support performing the HADR failovers…

When I do work in other domains – even something as connected as scripting – I find the error messages confusing and unhelpful. Most of the time, this is mostly because I don’t know much about the language or the…

I ran into this error message recently and thought I’d describe what the issue was. The Scenario I was building a new consolidated development database server for a client – moving away from 10 separate database servers to one (big)…

Some of the more complicated work a DBA does is often analyzing a query. Whether it is proactive or in response to a performance problem, there are so many factors that go into query performance. Even when looking at a…

Sometimes configuration needs to be kept in sync between two or more Db2 systems. There are a variety of reasons – sometimes this is for keeping two HADR servers in sync, and other times it may be for keeping a…

Corrected on 9/8/2017 to reflect correct syntax to eliminate just the one table. The Problem The application in this case – SPSS – maintains an exclusive lock at all times on one table. I think this is poor application design,…
I think that one of my least favorite phrases is “Nothing else changed!” More common than a performance problem that simply slowly creeps up with performance getting worse and worse over time is the sudden performance problem. Many times, sudden…

It’s that magical time of year again. DBAs excitedly pack their bags for a week-long trip. On-call rotation is hurriedly passed to the next poor soul on the rotation list. Ember dons her trademark pigtails. Melanie Stopfer crams another 20…

Some time ago, I wrote a post that suggested using the NUM_LOG_SPAN database configuration parameter to prevent long-running transactions from filling your transaction log. Using NUM_LOG_SPAN will indeed prevent the problem of long running transcations causing log file saturation, but…

dsmtop is a long-awaited refresh of the wildly popular db2top. Like db2top, dsmtop is a free tool, included with DB2. It is in the base DB2 install starting with 11.1, and can be installed on DB2 10.1 or 10.5. History…

This is something DB2 DBAs may need to do as a part of setting up TSAMP. Nearly every server I’ve done before has had a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, but I ran into a server recently that wasn’t, and thought…