Teleidoscope

Wed, Sep 10, 2008

DB2

Posted at 2:21 pm MDT to Technology

I have to say I'm not overly impressed with current implementations of DB2, IBM's database, as a competitor for Oracle and mySQL, etc.

On a Windows 2003 VMWare image it tends to peg the CPU usage at 99% and lock everything up. When I googled for the problem and solution I found reports of the problems going back several years, with no comprehensible explanation of the problem.

The reported solution (at least temporarily) is to kill the pegged db2syscs process, restart DB2, and open the Control Center. Then select all of the tables in each database, right click, select Run Statistics and select Collect statistics on all columns with distribution.

Doing that mysteriously made the database usable for about an hour, but now it is pegging the CPU again.

I'm trying to switch to a Linux installation of DB2 on my host system, but db2setup just hangs without doing anything or giving any indication of what the problem might be. And it isn't as if it was unsupported on Ubuntu: the distribution has been certified for DB2 for a couple of years.

It isn't a processor or memory problem.

I'm going to kill the pegged process again, shutdown VMWare, and see if I can get the db system to load. If I can't, I'll see about downloading the public version of Oracle. I really need to be spending my time doing things other than debugging infrastructure.

Feh.

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