Wednesday, February 13, 2013

IBM Data Studio Overview

If you install the latest version of DB2 (DB2 V10.x), the first thing you will notice is that the old trusted DB2 Control Center interface is not there anymore.   In fact, there are no GUI tools shipped with DB2 installation. So, how do you manage DB2 then?  You will need to download and install a separate component called IBM Data Studio. 
 
First of all, IBM Data Studio is not a brand new product.   Remember, DB2 Control Center usage has been deprecated since 2009. IBM DataStudio has been out there for quite some time and it is based on IBM InfoSphere product line. Here is one of the blogs I came across while researching on this product history.
 
 
IBM Data Studio is an Eclipse based product and relying on JDBC for all database communication. It can be downloaded at no charge from IBM website link below. An IBM ID is required. 
 
 
You simply need to download the latest version.  (Version 3.2 as of this writing).
 
Downloading the IBM Data Studio client should be good enough for most of the common administration needs,  SQL Development, Stored procedure development requirements. Optionally, you can download the Web Console component if you need to monitor the health of the database such as viewing tablespace status, connections, alerts, etc.  
 
Note: The Web Console component is based on IBM's Jazz for Service Management.  You will need only one instance of this to manage all your DB2 databases.  Multiple administrators can share the same Web Console.  
 
In addition to the above links, here is another useful link I came across to learn more about IBM Data Studio.
 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-1201migctrlctrdatastudio/

Update:

Someone asked me about its backward compatibility.  It is fully compatible with DB2 V9.7/9.8 but for older versions, only subset of features are available.  For basic querying, it should be compatible with DB2 V9.1 or later. 

Here is a link that describes the feature set and version compatibility.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27022148
 
Hope you find this helpful.