“Valencia? Ooh; nice. You’ll have to pack your shorts”. That was the typical response when I told the folks back home what I was up to this week.
Hmm. Well, not exactly shorts weather. This morning’s news reports that many people in Valencia have lost their lives due to severe flooding, which is incredibly sad. The region experienced a year’s worth of rain in just a few hours, and more rainy weather is expected to follow.
Db2 LUW v12.1 News
In other news, the sessions on Monday spent a lot of time introducing the Db2 LUW v12.1 release. Judging by the fact that there wasn’t a spare seat in most sessions, I’d say there was considerable interest. I’d picked up much of this info from the Technical Advisory Board, but this gave much more detail.
Similarly on Tuesday, there has been a lot of focus on v12.1 and, in particular, what it will enable in pureScale, Pacemaker and how it will impact the operation of the (relatively) new AWS RDS Db2 offering. Andrew Hilden did a session yesterday on AWS RDS for Db2 Tips and Tricks which was very useful for those of us struggling to make use of this feature. And Mike Springgay (also from the Toronto labs) was able to share some of the release dates and features. What we can expect, in part, is
- 1 GA Nov 24
- 1.1 Feb 25
- 1.2 Jun 25
- 1.3 Oct 25
And some of the content that we might expect (in no particular order) includes
- TBSPACEADM (to get around having to administer BufferPools and Tablespaces using the rather esoteric RDSADMIN Procs on AWS RDS)
- Online Index REORG for pureScale
- AI Optimizer enhancements
- File permissions on files like db2diag.log become optional
- Online REORG on partitioned tables with global (non-partitioned) indexes
- HADR
- Remove LOB restriction on ROS
- Increase number of aux standbys
But these (apart from the GA) are aspirational dates and content and the dates themselves may, of course, vary.
What we do know, is that the v12.1 GA release will include the AI Query Optimizer. And this could be a game-changer; particularly for those of us who spend considerable parts of their working lives up to their elbows in access plans and statistics in an effort to improve application performance in Db2.
One other session today that I think deserves particular mention was the Db2 migration across architectures and encodings by Miguel Sanjurjo. He appears to have solved the thorny problem of migrating databases with one encoding or ‘endianness’ to another. Although his presentation related to an actual case that moved on-premise to another on-premise, there is no reason this could not operate to (or from) a cloud-hosted solution. Worth a read if you have that problem to deal with.
Well, the thunderstorms appear to have abated for now, so I might risk heading outdoors for a stroll round.