Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2006-01-24.) As a performance consultant I used to think it was only me that needed to glean configuration information from performance data – because I didn’t want to ask foolish questions of the customer. But gradually (it seems to me) customers have ended up in the same boat as me: What we thoughtContinue reading “Self-Documenting?”

(Originally posted 2006-01-12.) I’m lucky to again be on the agenda at this conference. Here’s a link to the conference website. This is a very good arena for technical education on the mainframe, with many great speakers from the development laboratories, coupled with a number from the field. I always learn a lot – soContinue reading “System z9 and zSeries Technical Conference”

(Originally posted 2006-01-12.) APARs PQ99707, PK07317 and PK08949 document two performance improvements that help WAS applications using the Universal JCC (java) driver. All the enhancements are available for DB2 Version 8. The “CPU cost” one is also marked as available for DB2 Version 7. Higher DB2 CPU costs and longer transaction times are caused whenContinue reading “DB2 Performance Improvements for Websphere Application Server JCC Clients”

(Originally posted 2006-01-12.) Running out of extents for DB2 tablespaces can be a real bore. So installations like to monitor them (and I like to see them too). APAR PK12653 describes a fix to the recording of the number of extents in the SYSTABLEPART Catalog table. This fix is only available for DB2 Version 8.Continue reading “Fix to the way extents are calculated in SYSTABLEPART”

(Originally posted 2006-01-12.) I’m working through the queue of interesting APARs that have been sitting in my in-basket. (I guess it’s a “New Year’s tidying up” thing.) 🙂 Here’s one that relates to workload routing for DDF. It does prereq z/OS R.7 on all members so it won’t be of that much interest to customersContinue reading “Better Routing of DDF Work in a Parallel Sysplex with z/OS 1.7”

(Originally posted 2006-01-04.) APAR PQ91316 documents 4 new Web Services Consumer UDFs – for both Version 7 and Version 8. Being a consumer means the UDF can request services from other providers, rather than serving other requesters. The APAR text itself describes the UDFs, and incorporates an example.

(Originally posted 2005-12-01.) If you ask Performance Trace nicely enough it’ll tell you what statement in a package is consuming all the CPU. Over the past couple of years we’ve been working on code to analyse the DB2 Catalog and PLAN_TABLE tables to do SQL tuning. It’s been an interesting journey – and, I guess,Continue reading “DB2 Catalog and Performance Trace Mismatch”

(Originally posted 2005-11-23.) A recent client of mine is still using Hiperpools – while in 64-bit mode (and with > 2GB of memory on each LPAR). It is my contention that they would save CPU, and probably get better buffer pool effectiveness, if they switched to a judicious mixture of virtual pools and data spaceContinue reading “DB2 in 64 Bit Mode and Hiperpools”

(Originally posted 2005-11-20.) IBM Shows del.icio.us… is a very interesting article by David Weinberger (author of The Cluetrain Manifesto) about all the interesting things going on on the web. I’m proud to say that IBM is doing a lot of these interesting things – and I’ve taken time over the last two years to becomeContinue reading “Inside Big Blue – Great Web Stuff”

(Originally posted 2005-11-14.) As many people know I’ve been a Queen fan since 1974. And us Queen fans all know how we feel about Freddie Mercury’s death and the subsequent retirement of John Deacon. So it was with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation that I saw Queen + Paul Rodgers live in Hyde ParkContinue reading “Queen: Return of the Champions DVD”