Installation and Configuration Supplement

The Benefits and Disadvantages in a Thin Environment

As with most scenarios, there are advantages and disadvantages associated with a Thin-workstation in your environment. You have to go over these issues and decide whether or not this type of configuration suits your business needs. For the most part, you will find this method of supporting a DB2 Client or DB2 Connect Personal Edition well suited for most business models.

The benefits of a Thin-environment are:

1. Reduced disk space required for each Thin-workstation; you can save from 16-112 MB per workstation.
2. Easier software changes and updates; you only have one copy of the DB2 product to change and update.
3. Centralized maintenance of code; you need to install, update or migrate the code on only one machine.
4. FixPack rollout and rollbacks are easier to administer and accomplish.
5. Installation can follow a PUSH or PULL methodology; you can integrate this type of deployment with a system management tool and PUSH the installation out to its target workstations.

The drawback of a Thin-workstation environment is an initial potential loss of system performance, since at program invocation time, DB2 programs are loaded from a code server instead of the client machine. However, any loss will depend on network load, network speed, and code server speed and load.

Once this code has been loaded by the Thin-workstations, the fact that these are Thin-workstations becomes transparent to the user. Thin-workstations have to dynamically load libraries as needed, so if you start another DB2 application, you may experience a minor performance degradation period while this new application is being loaded.

For example, when you connect to a database, you will notice a short performance loss when compared to a client where the code is locally installed. After this code was loaded, your client would have the same performance as the locally installed client. If after you have connected to the database you decided to start the Client Configuration Assistant (CCA), you would then experience a performance loss as the code associated with this connectivity tool was loaded from the code server. In reality, you likely wouldn't be loading the CCA and other components very often, you will mostly be using the run-time environment.

Another potential disadvantage is the location of the catalog files. The catalog files contain all the information needed for a workstation to connect to a database. Unless you are using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) in your environment, you have to maintain catalog information on each and every workstation, just like a regular installation.

If you are not using LDAP, there are some attractive solutions to this problem. You can get around cataloging databases on each and every Thin-workstation by using the profile export and import options provided by the CCA. For example, a e-mail message could easily be sent to each workstation that would update each machine with the correct catalog information.