Does anyone know if it is necessary to rebind DB2 plans when you are migrating from DB2 OS/390 version 5.2 to version 7.1??? Or should the DB2 plans in an older version not affect a newer version?

That should be documented in the upgrade instructions. You probably do have to rebind some DB2 supplied plans.

Okay, let me be more specific. If i have COBOL pgms that access DB2 and have DB2 plans.. would I need to rebind them?

thanks ahead of time

Yes, I understood what you asked. You need to read the upgrade documentation. That will tell you whether you need to rebind application programs. Even if someone claimed to know the answer, you would be insane to rely on that without verifying it in the published DB2 upgrade documentation.

As Marcus says, I would suggest a rebind .. Whether it is mandatory or not will be documented in the manuals ..

rebind gives the database a chance to re-create the access plans to make use of the enhancements to the optimizer ...

Cheers
Sathyaram

if you use plans and packages, plan rebind should not be necessary.
but there are some prereqs for applications that must be met when converting to DB2 V7.1, there are a few new reserved words that are now checkt more strictly, so that you might want to test wether you are still able to bind all programs.

What we did in our environment was recompile all programs on the test machine, just to make sure we got a clean compile on all (that were about 25'000 programs). Some of the programs had to be changed. then we bound all of them, and compared the explain output against the output from the old DB2 system's explain. again, there were differences in the access path in some cases. Everything was changed and corrected and brought in production before conversion.

On the day of the conversion to V7, we did not rebind any of the application programs, except the ones delivered with DB2.