Lockwood Lyon

Big Data is here, or will soon be here for the majority of IT enterprises. Database Administrators must now deal with large volumes of data and new forms of high-speed data analysis.  If your responsibility includes performance tuning, here are the areas to focus on that will become more and more important in the age […]

Know Your Data (Warehouse) In general, storage and analysis of Big Data will occur either within or in concert with the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Integrating all parts of your Big Data solution will require interfaces to every part of the EDW process.  Here is a summary of the main subsystems of an EDW. After […]

The design requirements of an application usually determine the most effective database design and database administration support processes. If, however, the database administrator (DBA) is not present during the requirements definition process, sub-par performance can result. Essential DBA Choices and Processes Quite often the DBA must make choices that will affect application performance, database recoverability, […]

Database administrators tend to think of SQL tuning as necessary, important, even critical. The reality is that the savings realized by tuning SQL, usually manifested in saved CPU time and decreases in elapsed times, may offset the costs incurred in time and resources. Ask yourself this question:  How long have DBAs been doing SQL tuning?  […]

How The Team Should Operate The most important goal for a tech support team is to give management the data they need to prioritize the team’s work. Typically management will work from a spreadsheet or project plan that includes task categories and team assignments. To do this well, management needs an important piece of information: […]

Tuning Strategies Let’s assume that as a DBA you are given the assignment of performance tuning in the DB2 z/OS environment. Is there more than one way to do this?       Yes, there are several. Here are five major approaches to performance tuning. SQL Tuning             behavior-based Resource Constraint Tuning   resource-based Application Tuning            application-based […]

Many applications have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that promise quick turnaround or acceptable on-line response time. Lengthened transaction elapsed times are a cause for concern. Here are several methods the database administrator can use to alleviate these issues. Elapsed Time Generally speaking, the perceived elapsed time for a DB2 database transaction or single query depends […]

Budgets are shrinking and management’s eyes are clearly on the bottom line. Under these conditions, what would a DB2 database administrator (DBA) want on their holiday wish list? Early Inclusion in Application Design We start our list at the beginning; application design. Far too often projects begin without including the database administrator.  This is understandable, […]

Both application designers and database administrators sometimes take the simplistic view that regular backups of application data are sufficient for any recovery needs. The strategy of weekend backups can easily backfire!  Backup methods that meet the application’s and enterprise’s needs start with a sound recovery strategy.  Further, this strategy must be applied from the beginning, […]

Introduction The term Big Data is very common, and is used to connote large data stores (typically in an enterprise data warehouse) that are queried with high-speed data analytics software. To understand what this means, we break down the components of Big Data and discuss the options you must consider if you wish it to […]

Database Design for Availability Eliminate Hot Spots A hot spot is a physical place in the database where a lot of data access is happening. The worst situation is when a lot of inserts, updates, deletes, and selects are happening to a set of rows in one location. A flood of inserted rows requires DB2 […]

Database Design Techniques Data Partitioning There are two distinct methods for physically partitioning data. Horizontal partitioning is the most common data partitioning option. With this technique, the database designer physically separates the data into multiple datasets. Each dataset is a partition, and each contains rows within a particular key range. Common key ranges are by […]