Re: Question (pre-newbie) about DB2

John

I think, since you are asking, that you could walk right into an i job. Mainframers with an open mind are probably better candidates for retraining that Windows/Linux folks, IMO. Once you get away from thinking you have to DO a lot of things. Others have mentioned the way an i just runs. The stuff sys admins do on a z, a lot of it is done already by IBM. That is one reason that an i with the same processing power (how to measure) will run slower than a z, because it is keeping track of everything and recording it. As Rob said, it's not a big deal these days, if you toss a little extra cash at it.

Storage management is pretty automatic,unless you start mucking about with some special needs. You don't have anywhere near the knobs for managing DB2 on i that you do in the other flavors - again, the system does so much for you. And usually very well.

There is a site at IBM on porting to i - very good intro stuff there - link is

http://www.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries

There is a link there to an overview of the architecture - <overview/overview.html>

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries/overview/overview.html

This might be helpful.

Vern

McKown, John wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tommy.Holden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:27 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Question (pre-newbie) about DB2

one good sys admin can handle managing the system (regardless of the machine's specs/size)

Maybe. If he doesn't mind never having a guaranteed day off (no vacation
because we __might__ have a problem). And never gets sick. Sounds more
like the z people would be canned and the Windows/Linux people would be
trained on the i. That would only increase their work load by a
fraction, given how many are needed to support Windows. Which means that
I should really consider a job change (if such were possible as there
aren't many z jobs around anymore).

as far as DBAs even though the programming staff *can* double as a DBA i still recommend one just due to the fact that i know a lot of programmers who can't grasp (or can't implement) a good database strategy. since the sysadmin staff could be reduced by 3 then yes the TCO would be at least half of the TCO for a z system (there's other savings besides less sys admin but too many to list)

Well, the DBA staff here is separate from the programming staff and the
sysadmin staff. From what I understand, the DBAs write "stored
procedures" to do the actual SQL. There is supposedly no SQL embedded in
any application. The application calls/invokes the stored procedure to
do the database work.

the i is an awesome system...now if only IBM would get to marketing the platform better...(and yes Trevor that opened a door you're well known for walking through 8^) their marketing isn't non-existent but it is lacking...

Now, this sounds like the same lament that we have on the z. It is an
excellent, albeit expensive, platform which IBM seems to be determined
to milk until the cow dies.

Thanks,
Tommy Holden

--
John McKown Systems Engineer IV
IT

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