By Madhavi Amirneni and Eric Radzinski
Modern enterprises face the challenge of delivering software updates at unprecedented speed while ensuring data integrity and regulatory compliance. To meet these demands, organizations rely on DevOps pipelines. A typical pipeline integrates numerous tools—such as Git, Jenkins, Travis, GitHub, Bitbucket, and various pipeline tools—each serving a distinct purpose in moving DDL changes from source code repositories through build, test, and deployment stages.
However, with so many tools involved in the overall solution, maintaining a seamless, coordinated experience across all phases of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) can become difficult, often leading to inefficiencies and fragmented workflows that require a significant amount of communication between the DBA, security administrator, pipeline engineer, and application developer. This is where IBM Db2 CI/CD Expert for z/OS comes in.
Db2 CI/CD Expert brings modern, role-based capabilities to managing Db2 object definitions (DDL) with a streamlined Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) experience. Designed to support CI/CD practices, Db2 CI/CD Expert empowers teams with on-demand, self-service operations, databases-as-code, and site rules enforcement. It aligns database change management with enterprise DevOps tools and workflows to enable greater automation, consistency, and simplicity in managing Db2 for z/OS objects.
Db2 CI/CD Expert builds upon and broadens the capabilities of its predecessor, IBM Db2 DevOps Experience, by providing a comprehensive set of REST APIs for both CI and CD operations that cover everything from defining site rules to builds, change validation, testing, and deployment. And it keeps track of your changes to help cover security and governance requirements. It integrates seamlessly with popular tools such as Git, Bitbucket, Jenkins, IBM DevOps Deploy, and others, which enables developers, DBAs, and pipeline engineers to collaborate more effectively and reduce manual handoffs. It supports continuous deployment across multiple environments while maintaining DBA visibility and control. With its browser-based UI, organizations can automate schema management tasks and design custom workflows that fit their delivery pipelines.
The IBM Z Application development portfolio supports clients at each step of the lifecycle with the latest release of IBM Db2 for z/OS Developer Extension 2.2.4, which provides day-one integration with Db2 CI/CD Expert by allowing you to make changes to existing DDL, validate those changes based on your existing site rules, and analyze the impact of those changes before submitting a pull request.
Db2 CI/CD Expert integration is just one of several significant new features in Db2 Developer Extension 2.2.4, which also includes support for XML schemas in catalog navigation, support for calling and deploying stored procedures and user-defined functions from the catalog navigator, and support for generating an SQL impact report so that you can evaluate potential changes before you decide to commit or roll back those changes.
These two new offerings, when used together, enables enterprises to address fragmented workflows and achieve end-to-end automation, consistency, and control in their DevOps pipelines.
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