DB2 provides interfaces that can be used by third-party media management products to store and retrieve data for backup and restore operations. This function is designed to augment the backup and restore data targets of diskette, disk, tape (UNIX based systems only), and ADSM, that are supported as a standard part of DB2.
These third-party media management products will be referred to as vendor products in the remainder of this appendix.
DB2 defines a set of function prototypes that provide a general purpose data interface to backup and restore that can be used by many vendors. These functions are to be provided by the vendor in a shared library on UNIX based systems, or DLL on OS/2 or the Windows operating system. When the functions are invoked by DB2, the shared library or DLL specified by the calling backup or restore routine is loaded and the functions provided by the vendor are called to perform the required tasks.
This appendix is divided into four parts: