Db2 Administration Foundation for z/OS (Db2 Admin Foundation) and its counterpart services, including SQL Tuning Services, Db2 Query Workload Tuner, and Db2 Analytics Accelerator Administration services, was recently enhanced with several highly requested new features. All of these new features support Db2 13 for z/OS.
To showcase these new features and to let current and potential users of Db2 Admin Foundation get some hands-on experience with them, we’ve updated the IBM Z Trial for Db2 Admin Foundation with a set of new scenarios that demonstrate their capabilities in a working z/OS environment.
The evolution of Db2 Administration Foundation
Db2 Admin Foundation has continuously been enhanced with new features since its original release in June 2021, expanding its capabilities and improving the user experience through the use of a single user interface - the Zowe-based Unified Experience for z/OS.
The first iteration of the IBM Z Trial for Db2 Admin Foundation covered its basic features:
- In-depth Db2 catalog navigation for retrieving Db2 assets in an was-to-read format
- Intelligent SQL and Db2 command editors and a data source name (DSN) command execution interface
The second iteration of the IBM Z Trial was updated to demonstrate the integration of SQL Tuning Services into Db2 Admin Foundation, which includes:
- Statistics Advisor, which generates a recommended set of RUNSTATS commands to improve query performance
- Visual Explain, which generates a graphical representation of the access paths that are used by a query
- Capture Query Environment, which captures details about the environment in which you are running a query and that you can provide to IBM Support to debug a performance issue more quickly
The latest IBM Z Trial adds two new scenarios that cover the latest Db2 Admin Foundation enhancements:
- The integration of Db2 Query Workload Tuner allows you to invoke an extended set of SQL tuning capabilities, such as Access Path Advisor, Index Advisor, Query Rewrite Advisor, and SQL Annotator
- The integration of Db2 Analytics Accelerator Administration Services, which allows you to manage accelerators, add and remove tables to be accelerated, and enable and disable tracing
The following figure illustrates the Db2 Admin Foundation architecture, including its integrated offerings:
Accessing the IBM Z Trial for Db2 Administration Foundation
You can register for this IBM Z Trial here. Within approximately two hours after signing up, you will receive an email with the credentials for you to access your own on-demand environment.
When you sign into the IBM Z Trial environment, a window will open with a short description of the five available scenarios that are included in the Db2 Admin Foundation IBM Z Trial.
Although it’s recommended that you run the scenarios sequentially, they are completely independent, and each scenario can be executed on its own. However, ideally you should run scenario 3 before scenario 4 because you will define a tuning profile in scenario 3 that will be used in scenario 4; otherwise, you can use one of the existing profiles.
When you select a scenario, another window will open that indicates which products you are working with. For example, in the following scenario you are working with Db2 Admin Foundation and Db2 Query Workload Tuner:
Clicking Start Scenario will open a Zowe web browser desktop and a walk-through script to its right. Click Next on the walk-through script to start your experience.
To learn more about Db2 Administration Foundation for z/OS and its integrated services, see the following information:
Enjoy your trial! We welcome any feedback that you can share with us.