Today, November 14th, 2024, marks the general availability of Db2 12.1 for LUW. Whilst this version is packed with a plethora of features, I want to call out 12 features that I am especially excited about and cannot wait to use. In no particular order then:
- TSA-less pureScale – With Db2 12.1 on Linux comes the final episode of the journey to replace TSA with the well-established, industry recognised Pacemaker as the clustering solution of choice for Db2. This will allow for better recovery times, ease of deployment, and much more flexibility.
- Name space separation with TENANT construct allows for the creation of a logical separation between one or more database schemas, easily isolating differing sets of tables from each other. This allows multiple independent users or applications to use the same database without worrying about collision on the object names used by each user or application.
- Intra-tablespace parallelism for backup operations. Multiple threads are now used to process each tablespace, leading to faster backups and a reduction in the overall elapsed time to run a backup.
- AI–powered query optimizer. Initial functionality in this release will focus on using AI to automate cardinality estimation tuning which is one of the most important functions in a cost-based optimiser..
- End-to-end SSL encryption support for Db2 pureScale with HADR.
- Automatic history file pruning for automatic Db2 backup operations. Enabling the auto_del_rec_obj database configuration parameter, allows the automatic pruning of the automatic backup path according to the rules of the standard database pruning.
- Remote storage for automatic backup operations on Amazon S3.
- Db2 history file enhancements which now has valuable information on individual and total backup image sequence sizes, whether the backup image is compressed or encrypted, total size of the log archival space, and whether the log archival space is compressed or encrypted.
- HADR standby on active log path disk full. By default, the HADR standby stays up when it runs into a disk full condition situation in the active log path. This can cause transactions on the primary to be blocked. In Db2 12.1, setting the new DB2_HADR_BLOCK_ON_DISKFULL registry variable to OFF, will ensure the standby database is brought down in a disk-full situation. This takes HADR out of PEER state and unblocks the transactions on the primary
- Security enhancements with trusted context through stored procedures, audit exceptions within trusted context, data masking, and SSL for data in transit in HADR.
- Schema evolution with DROP and RENAME support for online schema updates to columnar tables. This is especially welcome news for those of you using columnar databases and been eagerly waiting for this functionality.
- Federation enhancements with updated support and performance enhancements for Snowflake and Oracle 23ai.