Administration Guide

Chapter 1. Administering DB2 Universal Database

DB2 provides the flexibility for you to run a wide range of hardware configurations. It allows you to choose how to best match your hardware and application requirements with a specific DB2 product configuration.

DB2 also supports many different levels of complexity in database environments, and there are considerations and tasks specific to each environment. These are discussed in detail in both the Administration Guide and other books in the DB2 library (see Appendix S, Using the DB2 Library). In some cases, entire sections of these books are only appropriate for a specific environment. After reading the preface to this book ("About This Book"), you will understand which chapters in this and the other volumes of the Administration Guide (the Administration Guide: Implementation, and the Administration Guide: Performance) are appropriate for your business needs.

If you are new to relational database management systems (RDBMSs), or to DB2, you will find the section entitled "Basic Relational Database Concepts" helpful. If you are familiar with these concepts, or do not need to review them, you can skip this section and move directly to the sections detailing more advanced topics, such as:

• Federated systems. This sections discusses database management systems (DBMSs) that support applications and users submitting SQL statements referencing two or more DBMSs or databases in a single statement.
• Parallel database systems. This section provides an introduction to the types of parallelism available with DB2. Components of a task, such as a database query, can be run in parallel to dramatically enhance performance.
• Distributed transaction processing. This section discusses how you can access multiple databases in a single transaction, and how you can use your databases in a distributed transaction processing environment.
• High availability systems. This section presents an overview of the high availability failover support that is provided by DB2. Failover capability allows for the automatic transfer of workload from one processor to another when there is hardware failure.

DB2 can address your most specialized data management needs, such as:

• Replication, which allows you to copy data on a regular basis to multiple remote databases. If you need updates from a master database to be copied automatically to other databases, you can use the replication features of DB2 to specify what data should be copied, which database tables the data should be copied to, and how often the updates should be copied. If you want to use the replication features of DB2, refer to the Replication Guide and Reference. It introduces the concepts of DB2 data replication, and it describes how to plan, configure, and administer a replication environment.
• Data warehousing, in which you can create stores of "informational data", or data that is extracted from operational data and then transformed for end-user decision making. For example, a data warehousing tool might copy all the sales data from the operational database, perform calculations to summarize the data, and write the summarized data to a target in a separate database. You can query the separate database (the warehouse) without impacting the operational databases. For detailed information about data warehousing, refer to the Data Warehouse Center Administration Guide.
• A geographic information system (GIS), which can be created through Spatial Extender. A GIS is a complex of objects, data, and applications that allows you to generate and analyze spatial information about geographic features. In Spatial Extender, a geographic feature can be represented by a row in a table or view, or by a portion of such a row. For detailed information about using Spatial Extender, refer to the Spatial Extender User's Guide and Reference.

The Administration Guide: Planning also covers database design, including logical database design and physical database design considerations for DB2. Other planning issues, such as planning database migration, identifying incompatibilities that might impact your applications (an incompatibility is a part of DB2 Universal Database that works differently than it did in a previous release of DB2; if used in an existing application, it will produce an unexpected result, necessitate a change to the application, or reduce performance), and exploiting national language support (NLS), are also discussed.

The Administration Guide: Implementation covers the details of implementing your database design. Topics include creating and altering a database, database security, database recovery, and administering DB2 using the Control Center, a DB2 graphical user interface.

The Administration Guide: Performance is covers topics and issues concerned with establishing, testing, and improving the performance of your application and of DB2 itself.