Hi,

We are thinking of upgrading our DB2 8.2.6 on Windows 2000. Find DB2 9.1 and 9.5 on IBM site. Considering it is our production env, is V9.1 more stable than V9.5? Any thing special to be taken care of during migration? We will also be shifting our production servers to IBM blades+Vmware Virtuals. Does 9.5 provide better compatibility to virtualisation?

Thanks

Harikumar

Both V9.1 and 9.5 are stable products, so it is up to you to decide which way you want to go. Personally I would go the the very latest v9.5.

I have no personal experience with virtualization, but if it is set up correctly, DB2 should be fine with it.

Andy

Why would you want to migrate to 9.1 if 9.5 already available? Then you would have to migrate to 9.5 later and do two migrations instead of one.

9.5 has much better advanced XML if your applications need to use it. But bear in mind you can not use it if you use DPF.

Hi, Andy and All,

I am not sure whether V9.5 is complete in all sense for larger Production implementation. There are many projects in my knowledge that have moved from V9.1 to V9.5 during weekend and from Monday onwards all respective users started complaining about severe performance degradation. After that with 10 hours window, some of them have been reverted to V9.1 as they are in Prod and no users are ready to take chance. Now those are being tested with V9.5 in Stress Test environment. IBM Tor is also looking into. Have anyone of you faced any similar experience while moving from 9.1 to 9.5?

Both 9.1 and 9.5 are separate products and are being supported at the same time, with fixpacks issued for each. 9.1 is at fixpack 6 and 9.5 is at fixpack 3a. This is different than 8.1 and 8.2 where as soon as you apply fixpack 7 on to 8.1 you are at 8.2.

9.5 has more features than 9.1, but 9.1 is probably a bit more stable. However, now that fixpack 3a has been released for 9.5 its stability has improved significantly since its initial base release.

Here is information with regard to the "projected" end of service dates (actual dates have not been set yet) that could affect your decision:

V9.1 DB2 9.1 Sept. 30, 2011

V9.5 DB2 9.5 April 30, 2013

There are a number of changes to the way memory and processes (multi-threading) are handled in 9.5. Hence it is necessary to do a thorough performance testing and possibly some config chages before moving to 9.5 ...

Just to add what Sathyaram has mentioned: in some projects (OLTP or DWH), tuning of APP_CTL_HEAP and APPGROUPMEMSZ always plays a vital role for better performance of the Applications. Till V9.1 we always used to try lots of trials for: app_ctl_heap_sz and appgroup_mem_sz to get the best possible value. Going forward in V9.5 , they are discontinued as this version is Thread based and NOT Application based. agressive STRESS TEST without these parameters are really the need of the hour before moving the Projects to 9.5 from 9.1.

I'm looking to hire a DB2 administrator for a couple of days (over two weeks) for a DB2 upgrade from 8.2 to 9.5, on a site located in Ireland. The daily rate is good. Can anybody recommend anyone?