What's new with DB2 11.5.8

I am excited to share that IBM released the much awaited DB2 release. In this release, IBM is delivering multiple new features that will help us build new use-cases and exciting new enhancements that could help us bring down the cost of our data management. In this blog we will go through new enhancement in DB2 V11.5.8 

Download link : https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6830623

Highlights of DB2 11.5.8

Remote Cloud Object Storage support available on Ubuntu

    With DB2 11.5.8, Remote Cloud Object Storage like IBM Cloud Object Storage or AWS S3 can be accessed from Ubuntu as well.

TLS 1.3 now supported

    With DB2 11.5.8, we can encrypt communication between DB2 Server and Client using TLS 1.3 version. Check blog DB2 SSL Configuration to configure SSL communication. If you are planning to use TLS 1.3 for SSL communication, check TLS 1.3 Limitations and Restrictions 

DB2 Availability in Public Cloud

    Now DB2 is available as self managed service in both AWS and Azure cloud. DB2 Purescale is available on AWS as self managed service.

Performance enhancements in DB2 11.5.8

Enhanced Set Integrity Performance

    Symmetrical multiprocessing parallelisation is now available for both incremental and non incremental  Set Integrity statements in non-MPP environment. To enable this set registry variable DB2_EXTENDED_OPTIMAZATION. If DB2_EXTENDED_OPTIMAZATION registry variable is set to value PRLSI ON, then only non incremental set integrity statement will be parallelised, to parallelise both incremental and non incremental set integrity statement set DB2_EXTENDED_OPTIMAZATION  to PRLSI INCR

Manageability enhancements in DB2 11.5.8

Improved management of bufferpool definition files

    On ROS enabled standby nodes, STMM does not tune bufferpool which impact reporting query performance. To overcome this, we use to configure fixed page size of bufferpool. Now with the help of db2bpf command we can better manage bufferpool defination files which in turn increases size of bufferpool on standby nodes while Primary node continue to benefit from STMM configuration.

       

Improved management of remote storage

    db2RemStgManager command can be used to list, copy, delete, get information about remote storage objects.

New routine for shutting down fenced mode process

    ADMIN_FMP_TERM routine can be used to shutdown db2fmp process on last usage or next access by a routine. It doesnot abnormally terminates a db2fmp process. If you want to terminate abnormally then you can use db2fmpterm command

High availability enhancements in 11.5.8

PACEMAKER Active/Passive cluster support

    Active/Passive cluster can be created using db2cm utility on RHEL 8.6 and SLES 15 SP3 and higher.

PACEMAKER Software Update

    In DB2 11.5.8, pacemaker version got upgraded to 2.1.2 and crmsh got updated to 4.4.0.

Log Replay performance improvement

    Registry variable DB2_RECOVERY_SETTINGS and DB2_DPS_LFR_PAGES_PER_IO can help to improve log replay performance during Crash recovery, database rollforward and on HADR Standby.

DB2 Purescale enhancements

    

Lock timeout improvement 

    DB2_AVOID_TIMEOUT_ON_EHL_LOCKS registry variable can be set to prevent application getting lock timeout error while waiting for object to exist NOT_SHARED state 

Concurrent Fixpack improvement  

    With DB2 11.5.8, in one operation installer will determine which hosts to update and order for updating, accordingly concurrently apply the updates.

Purescale supported environments

    Non-RDMA purescale configuration is supported on AWS self managed server with RHEL and  SUSE OS. Purescalse RDMA setup is supported on RHEL 8.4 Intel/AMD and Power LE architecture. 

Compression and Storage enhancements

LOAD utility performance improvement 

    While populating column organised tables, both performance and compression ration can be improved by enable registry variable DB2_COL_STRING_COMPRESSION.

Security enhancements

Monitor SSL Connection 

    Table function MON_GET_CONNECTION can be used to check SSL related information like SSL/TLS level, server certificate label etc. This can checked from new columns CONNECT_SEC_TYPE, CONNECT_CIPHER_SPEC, SSL_SRV_CERT_LABEL, SSL_SRV_CERT_FINGERPRINT.

For more details on DB2 11.5.8 refer IBM official document DB2 11.5.8

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