RE: Question (pre-newbie) about DB2

-----Original Message-----
From: PaulMmn [mailto:PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 10:03 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Cc: McKown, John
Subject: RE: Question (pre-newbie) about DB2

The System i still needs a system administrator, to install the OS
and do maintenance on it. And install other vendor software. And
write little utility programs.

Thanks for that info. I assumed it was true, but you know about ASSuME
<grin>. I was wondering something else, if you don't mind. What sort of
staffing levels are normal for a 4-way 570 system? That seems to be what
my manager indicates we are likely to be getting. We currently have 4
sysprogs support our z system.

You should become familiar with IBM's built-in job scheduler or Help
Systems' Robot/Schedule to turn the crank and run the jobs when
planned.

I think we are looking a number of Robot products on the i.

I went around and around with 'engineers' from a software company who
kept insisting on talking to the Database Administrator (that's me)
on the system i to find out when I did the index rebuilds and other
icky things to the database. I quoted (and copied) pages from IBM
manuals explaining that the system i takes care of that stuff
automatically... no rebuilding trees, or anything like that! Took a
hammer to finally make them agree that it wasn't needed. *sigh*

Interesting to know. Of course, at our shop, the DBAs are a separate
group from the sysprogs/sysadmins. I don't know if the current (Oracle
and MS SQL Server) DBAs will be DBAs on the i or what. Nobody knows yet.
This possible conversion is still in the "blue sky" arena, but
management is salivating because they have been told that an i can
handle our current z workload for less than 1/2 the cost.

There are still some database functions you will need to perform:
Reorganizing files to physically remove records deleted by a user
program but only flagged for removal by the OS; using the iSeries
Navigator (PC/GUI) to create recommended indices using the Index
Advisor.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT

Administrative Services Group

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