IDUG NA 2025

In this session, you will learn how to capture SQL statistics from Db2’s dynamic statement cache and how to combine them with the information from your EXPLAIN tables. The code that we use will be available for download after the session. Discover how to identify the queries that will benefit most from tuning, allowing you to focus your valuable time on those that matter. We start with simple metrics like RID list errors and work our way up to other performance metrics like top consumers, I/O statistics, lock contention, and more. You will learn how to track the performance and resource consumption of a given SQL statement over time, which makes it possible to spot trends. Finally, we will show how to detect access path changes in dynamic SQL workload. This is a common problem in environments with heavy dynamic workload. Something as simple as a single RUNSTATS execution on one of the involved tables can causeunexpected changes to the access path that Db2 chooses. Using historic explain information, these changes become visible, and you can take immediate action.

‘The Art of War’ is an ancient Chinese book on military skills, strategy, and tactics. It has influenced military thinking for centuries and has been applied to many fields outside of the military, such as business tactics, legal strategy, politics, sport, and now for the first time Db2 SQL performance!
In this session, you will learn how the ‘Art of War’, principles such as planning, resources, attack and defense, timing, strength/weaknesses, weapons, and knowledge, translate perfectly into tactics to defend against and defeat bad SQL.
This is a back–to–basics session where you will learn how to use these principles to fight against bad SQL. It provides many practical examples and for additional interest is illustrated using maxims and quotes from the book.

The Db2 family of products including Db2, Db2 Warehouse, and BigSQL provide a number of important features for diagnosing and solving your SQL problems. Through a series of practical examples, this session will bring you up speed on the latest capabilities available for SQL diagnostics and show you how you can leverage them to solve query problems in your own environment. You will learn how to identify your most expensive SQL statements using the package cache table functions, and how to use Db2's "time spent" metrics to analyze where your problem queries are spending their time. You will also learn some new tips for monitoring sort memory metrics and query memory consumption in order to tune your analytic workloads. Finally you will learn how to use the runtime explain capabilities in conjunction with the activity event monitor to capture actual query plan cardinalities as well the per object metrics.

The Db2 community constantly welcomes new database administrators or application developers that access Db2. One of the reasons – Db2 is known as a robust and reliable database management system and a perfect match for private and public cloud environments.
However, sometimes you might face database related issues. The session will cover the first steps in the process of problem determination and problem source identification (PD/PSI). The session gives hands–on examples and practical examples for the strategy and process to encircle and find the problem by asking the right questions and will share best practices for the first occurrence data capture (FODC) tools available for the DBA.