“INSERT the largest number of rows in the least possible time” is a frequent business/technical challenge for DST Systems (along with many other DB2 for z/OS installations.)
This presentation explores a key business INSERT challenge in detail. Performance metrics (DB2 ACCTG, IFCID 199, SMF 42-6) demonstrate I/O delay as the most frequent bottleneck. After the table was eliminated from I/O interest (through APPEND), index I/O delay became the culprit, and one index in particular. Not really able to reduce the number of I/Os enough (through bufferpool tuning), our only choice was: make those I/Os faster.
Solid State Devices offer a several-time improvement in I/O response vs. spinning drives. A sandbox benchmark (controlling DASD cache hit%, critical) created a business case, and we subsequently installed SSD on a production IBM DS8800 (which manages SSD technology in some very interesting ways.)
DST is a well-instrumented shop, systematically exploiting the metrics that DB2 and z/OS externalizes using SAS® and MXG. We explore these data sources in detail, showing how they drove our actions to a successful result.