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.

 

http://www.db2dean.com/Previous/DataStudio.html

 

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. 

 

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/im/data/

 

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.

Installing Cognos Framework Manager on Windows 64-bit?

Usually, Framework Manager installation is straight forward and consists of the following steps.

• Install Framework Manager on Windows
• Install FIPS Package for Framework Manager
• Use Cognos Configuration to connect to TCR infrastructure.

However, if you are installing Framework Manager on 64-bit Windows, there is an issue. The FIPS package for Framework Manager does not work correctly on Windows 64-bit. It installs correctly but causes problems with encryption and you will not be able to successfully connect the Framework Manager to TCR infrastructure. The workaround is to skip the install of FIPS package and directly proceed with Cognos Configuration after the base Framework Manager installation.

Hope this helps.

Extending TSAM using Eclipse

If you have been using Tivoli Service Automation Manager (TSAM) for Cloud provisioning, the usual way for service offering customization is to write Javascript and HTMLs directly on TSAM server.   With TSAM 7.2.2, there is an Eclipse based project available for self service offering customization.   Using this Eclipse project, you can perform Javascript customization right from your Eclipse IDE.  This artcile provides a high-level technical overview of this process.

To setup the Eclipse development environment,  you need to download/setup Eclipse first.  Even thought the latest versions of Eclipse should work, according to documentation, the Eclipse projects were tested with Helios (3.6) version and it is safe to use either Helios or Galileo versions.  Once Eclipse is setup, you simply have to download the project zip from TSAM install images located under TSAMBASE7300/samples/UI directory and import two Eclipse projects viz, custom_web and custom_web_build into Eclipse using Eclipse Import wizard. 

The custom_web project is used to make any javascript changes.  The custom_web_build project contains several ANT tasks that can be used to perform deployment to TSAM Server.   Connection to TSAM server is managed through SSH and you can specify the authentication parameters in build.properties. SSH authentication can use either SSH keys or password.

For testing you can use the quickdeploy ANT task that rebuilds the custom_web.war application as you publish the changes.  You can also backout the changes using undeploy task but that basically removes the custom_web.war from the TSAM server removing all custom changes.   For production deployments, you will have to rebuild the maximo.ear file using buildmaximoear.sh/cmd command.

You can find more information about this TSAM customization in TSAM 7.2.2 Extensibility Guide available at the following location.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v10r1/topic/com.ibm.tsam_7.2.2.doc/ext/c_sg_extensibility.html

Hope this helps you get started with TSAM customization. If you have any questions, please feel free to post it it in the comments.

DB2 Automatic startup for Linux/Unix

For many Tivoli installations, chances are you also need to setup DB2 for database services. One of the common issue with DB2 installations is that it is not setup to start automatically on reboot in Unix/Linux systems. IIRC, this feature was there in very old DB2 installations but removed for unknown reason.  So everytime your system reboots (however rare that may be), you would have to manually bring the service up.

To address this issue, usually the DB2 DBAs write a script to run DB2 automatically during startup.  If you don't have DBA support in your site, here is a very simple startup script that can be used to start DB2 automatically.   You will need root privileges to add this script to startup.

1.  Copy the following file and save it as /etc/init.d/db2server

#!/bin/bash

#

# chkconfig: - 91 35

# description: Starts and stops db2server. \

# Source function library.

. /etc/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.

. /etc/sysconfig/network

# Check that networking is up.

[ ${NETWORKING} = "no" ] && exit 0

prog="DB2"

inst="db2inst1"

start() {

    echo -n $"Starting $prog: "

    su - $inst -c "db2start"

}

stop() {

    echo -n $"Shutting down $prog: "

    su - $inst -c "db2stop force"

}

# See how we were called.

case "$1" in

  start)

        start

        ;;

  stop)

        stop

        ;;

  restart|reload)

        stop

        sleep 3

        start

        ;;

  *)

        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"

        exit 1

esac

2. Run the following commands as root. (Tested on RHEL5)

# chmod a+x /etc/init.d/db2server

# ln -s /etc/init.d/db2server /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S99Db2Server

# ln -s /etc/init.d/db2server /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99Db2Server

# ln -s /etc/init.d/db2server /etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K10Db2Server

# ln -s /etc/init.d/db2server /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K10Db2Server

That is it!   The above steps should work for Linux systems.  Please note that Unix systems (AIX, Solaris and HPUX) do follow different rc.d directory structure and you may have to link it to appropriate directory structure for your operating system. 

Also the script is setup to use db2inst1 as the DB2 instance owner. If your site uses different user, change the script accordingly. 

Hope this helps.

Getting a UDF definition in DB2

Recently, I was looking to change few DB2 User defined functions I developed in the past, but couldn't find
their source code even though the User Defined functions were present in the database.   Here is a simple SQL that I used to extract the UDF definition from the DB2 Catalog.

select routinename, text from syscat.routines r where routinetype = 'F' and language = 'SQL' and routinename like 'MyRoutine%'


PS: I did have problems running the above SQL in DB2 Command Editor. It showed the Text name fields as SQL0423N Locator variable "1" does not currently represent any value. SQLSTATE=0F001.   Instead, running the above SQL frrom command line worked without any issues.


Hope this helps.

Some notes on installing TBSM 6.1 FP 1

1. One of the prerequisites for TBSM 6.1 FP1 is TIP version 2.2.0.7, which you must install silently with the command:

install.sh -i silent -j $JAVA_HOME -f responsefile.txt

JAVA_HOME must NOT be set to your TIP Java directory (/opt/IBM/tivoli/tipv2/java) or anything similar. If it is, the installer will fail because it will see your install process running. So you need to point it to a DIFFERENT Java 1.6 location.

2. The FIT (Fixpack Intelligence Tool) component must be extracted into the $TIP_HOME/profiles/TIPProfile/etc directory. This means that you will have a directory named $TIP_HOME/profiles/TIPProfile/etc/fit when you're done copying.

PHP with WebSphere

Who knew it was possible? An open source initiative has made it possible to use PHP on WebSphere:

http://www.projectzero.org/php/