As a DBA, how often do you use Visual Explain during the development process?

Do you run every query through Visual Explain or run them through based on a particular criteria?

I've searched for best practices on this topic but have not had much luck.

Thank you

generally speaking, developers should be able to define the top what ever number of reports/SQL that are important to them. You concentrate on those first and foremost. Once that is done, you can start with a smaller fish.

Preferably every new SQL should be going through the review process. Reality proves it wrong. Getting an SQL for review from developers is harder then pulling teeth from the lion at times.

When I was a developer utilizing mainframe, every new SQL that I wrote had to be reviewed by the DBA or it was a no go. Now days in the UDB world when no one is getting billed for time spent processing this requirement went away at most shops.

Generally a DBA should be doing a SQL snaphot in one of the environments (test, QA, performance test, production) that would indicate which SQL statements are running slow. Then those problem statements should be explained to figure out how to fix it. In my experience it is usually not necessary or feasible to explain and analyze the output for every SQL statement.

Hee, we've walked the same road : from mainframe developer to DB2/LUW dba. vi is primitive compared to ISPF, right?

The reason why those (pro-active) days are gone is procedural. Dynamic SQL is hidden in java/jdbc code and mostly generated. When you confront the programmer with the SQL he/she does not even recognize it! To play the role our mainframe-collegues do is very hard to set-up on unix so we let it go and feed the package-cache to db2advis from time to time...