Introduction to DB2 on z/OS

CS185c

Chris Pollett

Jan. 26, 2010

Outline

The slides for this class are HTML files which both validate as XHTML 1.1 and pass the WAVE Accessibility Checker.
They are made to look like slides using a Javascript called Slidy.
The following keystrokes do useful things in Slidy:
- h - help (see all the commands)
- f - fullscreen (gets rid of the links at the bottom of the window
- space - advance a slide
- left/right arrows - forward or back a slide
- up/down arrows - scroll within a slide
- a - show all slides at once for printing
- n - add a note to a slide in a given namespace (a student of mine Sriram Krishnan added this extension)

z/OS is a descendant of the very famous OS/360 mainframe operating system developed in 1964.
One of the earliest books on IT management, The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks, was written about it.
z/OS is both highly reliable.
It is also capable of maintaining both old and new application.
DB2 for z/OS is IBMs relational database system for mainframes.

DB2 is used in many different settings:
- Financial Services - Banking, brokerages, and stock exchanges.
- Insurance Industry
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Government
- Healthcare
These settings often require 24/7 availability, have high volumes such as a billion or more shares being traded, and might have operations which are geographically spread out.

DB2 is used by the top 56 banks in the worlds.
As an example, The Bank of China uses DB2. It has 380 million client accounts. It processes 34 million transactions/hour, 9445 transactions/sec.
DB2 is also used by 23 of the 25 largest retailers.
DB2 is used by 9 out of 10 of the largest insurance providers.

File System
Relational Model - Codd 1970 View data as Relations, sets of tuples, and abstract away the method by which these tuples are stored.
Codd's paper proposed this approach, IBM's System/R was the first system to implement it.
It was also the system on which SQL was originally developed to manipulate and query the relations which were being stored.

DB2 is a descendant of System R
Version 1 of DB2 was developed for the MVS and released in 1983.
This would later become DB2 for z/OS.
Over the 1980 and 1990s support for concurrency control, mixed workloads, distributed computing, and availability scalability enhancements were added.
During the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s further enhancements to scalability, network performance, XML, SOA, Unicode, etc were added.

In this course, we'll be interested in DB2 running on z/OS.
There are several different versions of DB2:
- DB2 for z/OS
- DB2 for i5/OS
- DB2 for Linux,Unix, Windows
- DB2 for Linux System z9
These different versions are developed off different code bases; however, they each use common agreed upon standards and interfaces to ensure interoperability.