By Madhavi Amirneni and Eric Radzinski

The Db2 for z/OS tools modernization portfolio is comprised of a set of related products that makes it easier for application developers and database administrators of all skill levels to work with Db2 for z/OS. This portfolio is constantly evolving to provide the features and functions that these users need. We’d like to highlight some of the significant improvements that we’ve made to our portfolio over the past several months.

Db2 for z/OS Developer Extension

Since last December, we’ve released two updates to Db2 Developer Extension, both of which are loaded with significant new functionality.

We released Db2 Developer Extension 2.1.5 at the end of March 2024, which includes the following features:

• Support for creating, deploying, and running external SQL stored procedures and external Java stored procedures as the next step toward comprehensive stored procedure support
• Support for using a notebook interface, which enables you to work with SQL more efficiently and with greater flexibility
• Support for complex filtering when working with the Db2 catalog so that you can easily zero in on just the objects that you want to work with

And in December of last year, we released Db2 Developer Extension 2.1.4, which includes these features:

• Comprehensive support for navigating the Db2 catalog with the addition of support for global variables and REST services
• Improvements to the formatting of the DDL that is displayed when you navigate the Db2 catalog
• An enhancement that eliminates the requirement of saving the password for SQL Tuning Services servers
• Enhanced error messages that improve usability
• Multiple fixes to security vulnerabilities and bugs

All of these enhancements and more are documented in the Db2 for z/OS Developer Extension documentation repository. See What’s new in this release for links to details about using these new features.

Db2 Administration Foundation

The most recent updates to Db2 Administration Foundation were delivered in release 1.2.0.4 in January of 2024 and with Unified Management Server 1.2.0.6 in March. Together, these two updates provide the following enhancements:

For the Query Workload Tuner for z/OS component:

• The ability to capture SQL from a z/OS data set
• The ability to capture SQL from a user-defined repository
• Support for capturing the SQL that exists in a workload
• A variety of usability enhancements such job list separation and better error messages

For the Db2 Analytics Accelerator Loader component:

• The ability to extract queries as CSV files
• Enhanced monitoring capabilities for Db2 applications
• Smart table management enhancements such as more table details, last load time, statistics and timestamp collection
• Enhanced query monitoring details including application handle and stall time

See What’s new in Db2 Administration Foundation and What’s new in Unified Management Server for more information.

IBM SQL Tuning Services

In the past several months, we’ve released two updates to SQL Tuning Services that provide a variety of significant enhancements and improvements, including:

• The ability to run a large subset of the SQL Tuning Services APIs without setting up or using a tuning connection profile. This enhancement simplifies the process of administering an SQL Tuning Service environment and the overall setup process.
• Expanded support for the types of security mechanisms that you can use with tuning connection profiles, including encrypted user IDs and passwords and certificate authentication
• More flexibility with sorting workloads and jobs
• The ability to easily reset the logon credentials for the repository database by running a script

The PTFs that deliver these improvements also include many additional fixes. See What’s new in SQL Tuning Services for a more complete list of changes and links to the related APARs.

We hope you’ll take some time to learn more about these latest enhancements and the benefits that they can provide to your Db2 for z/OS environment.