Preface

Preface

This book is a complete guide to the advanced features of IBM DB2 Universal Database (UDB) Enterprise Server Edition (ESE) Version 8.1. DB2 UDB Version 8.1 is available on many operating systems, and the book has been written with this in mind. Any significant differences in the implementation of DB2 on the various operating systems are highlighted. Although this book was written as a study guide for the new Advanced DBA certification (DB2 Exam number 704), it can also be used as a reference by DBAs as they perform their day-to-day activities.

The Advanced DBA exam contains the following sections:

Advanced Administration

22%

 

Ability to design table spaces

 

1%

Ability to design buffer pools

 

5%

Ability to create buffer pools

 

4%

Ability to exploit inter-partition parallelism

 

12%

High Availability

28%

 

Ability to develop a logging strategy

 

5%

Ability to use advanced backup features

 

8%

Ability to use advanced recovery features

 

10%

Ability to implement a standby database

 

5%

Performance and Scalability

31%

 

Ability to identify and use DB2 registry variables that affect database system performance

 

1%

Ability to manage and tune memory and I/O

 

6%

Ability to analyze performance problems

 

1%

Ability to manage a large number of users and connections

 

3%

Ability to partition large amounts of data for performance

 

12%

Ability to manage the number of partitions in a database

 

8%

Networking and Security

19%

 

Ability to configure a partitioned database on multiple servers

 

8%

Ability to manage connections to host systems

 

3%

Ability to identify and resolve connection problems

 

5%

Knowledge of external authentication mechanisms

 

3%