Hello All,
I am currently evaluating tools for DB2 and PeopleSoft running on DB2. So far I have found Quest, BMC, Leccotech, and Embarcado. Does anyone have any experience they would like to share? Have you evaluated a tool and found it lacking? Does anyone know of any other tools for DB2.

I really want DB Admin, SQL Analysis/tuning, space management, etc?

We are running DB2 V.81.4 on HP/UX 11i 64-bit.

Thanks,
DBAgirl

I liked the dbguys tools for performance tuning ... The best was SQL Guy ..

Now dbguys has been taken over by BMC

Cheers
Sathyaram

I presently use the BMC Patrol and Quest Softwares. If you need to know anything about the two, just ask me.

Basically, we use BMC patrol for review the database history. The QUEST Central Diagnostics is a good panel to view the health of the database in one shot.

Rgds,
Naveen.

Have you try the Administation Tools that come with DB2?
Here are two documents prepared by DB2 UDB Administration Tools Development team. Hope that helps.

Administration Made Easier: New and Improved Tools in DB2 Universal Database
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...07gartner.html

Administration Made Easier: Scheduling and Automation in DB2 Universal Database
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...01gartner.html

Hi DB2nemo,
I like your name! Good thought but I have used Command Center, it is awful. It takes the screen so long to come up I can go get coffee just waiting for the first one. All of their GUI is very slow and I just don't have that type of time. I do almost everything at the command line but most of our other DBA's are unfamiliar with DB2 and will not have the time I did to get use to it.

Do you use it? I also found it to be very buggy?

Thanks,
DBAgirl

Hello,
We also use Patrol for monitoring but I get the impression BMC is no longer very interested in these types of tools. They have made no effort to fix their SQL tool so even though DB Xray seems good I only want one solution and BMC appears to be a risk. Why did you buy Quest Central instead of DB Xray when you were already using BMC tools?

With quest are you able to see last executed SQL and static SQL. I see the dynamic SQL but that's it. How have you been able to use it to solve problems? How is their tech support? Sometimes it just boils down to that.

Thanks,
DBAgirl

Hi,

Can somebody point some web links to that tools?

Thanks,
Grofaty

Tivoli has some DB2 monitoring tools, but not sure if they do administration. Tivoli is owned by IBM.

for db2 V8 under unix (AIX , linux )

for db2 Administration, db2cc is pretty good tool, even it is slow as it is java code (java is very hungry for memory), but DBA can almost do everything regarding DBA using db2cc

Also db2rc is working fine

Regarding the slow performance u can overcome this by using a fast linux machine (1 GB RAM would be working fine) with db2 v8 installed on it, use it only for Admin tasks.
Catalog all yr databases to this machine and get the power and performance of linux machine


I never tried SQL Assist or developer tools, cannot tell about it

I'm not sure which one you meant so here are all of them:
http://www.quest.com/solutions/db2.asp
http://www.bmc.com/products/proddocv...0_9033,00.html
http://www.candle.com/www1/cnd/porta...4,2683,00.html
http://www.leccotech.com/
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/...san/index.html

Regards,
DBAgirl

Hi,

A simple and fast freeware monitoring tool can be found at http://chuzhoi_files.tripod.com/index.html

Thanks! I'll go try it.

DBAgirl

I use DB2 tools from time to time, but I am not a DBA, so I may not see the problems you are seeing.

Control Center is feature rich in doing db admin, analysis, and space management. I agree with you that Command Center have minor bugs here and there. But that shouldn't stop you from using other features.
For instance, if you want to do SQL analysis, there is a tool called Visual Explain that allows you to submit a query and it will return a graphical access plan for the query. It shows what tables, indexes are involved and what operators are being used. You can then create indexes and run statistics to improve the acess plan. I found it pretty cool!

CA can be used to do Instance and database administration.

I notice in v8 a new feature called Health Monitor, which monitors the health of the db system and generates automatic alerts and can notify DBA through email.

For query monitoring, Query Patroller allows you to prioritize query, and schedule query to run. But Query Patroller is a separate product by IBM.

As for performance tuning, I know DB2 has something called Performance Expert, but I haven't use it so I don't want to give false comment.

We reviewed a product called ITGain Speedgain. It looked quite impressive and from what I understand its price is quite a bit lower the BMC and Quest. Might want to check it out.

It takes some time to start the java application GUI's
But once you initialize one - they're all ready for use.

The GUI's for fixpack 4 include easy tuning advice,
and extensive health monitoring, very helpful.

And of course (almost) all the GUI's come for free
with the Database software. So the purchase of a little extra
memory might even things out - compared to buying/installing/
operating a third party solution.

The Query Patroller software is very! good, especially if
you lack information on which users are burdening your
database - often unnecessarily - but alas its quite expensive.

BOW