Auto Alter for DB2 Couch Potatoes

How do you tune your DB2 Group Buffer Pools (GBP)?  You hear deafening silence….because NO ONE DOES.  Why? Answer is political, not technical.  z/OS “owns” CFRM policy, RMF CF Reports, and coupling facility  structures. You do DB2 - seldom the twain shall meet. You want to increase your local buffer pool...but you may have to beg the z/OS folks to increase the structure size in the CFRM policy. So let’s avoid conflict for both teams. Size your structure correctly, with enough headroom, have the z/OS guys implement Auto Alter, and with luck you may not have to talk to each other for a year!

Auto Alter is a z/OS capability that monitors the current conditions of coupling facility structures to avoid running out of space. It is of primary benefit to your GBPs as it can fix precisely the directory to data ratio that we cannot and does so on the fly. You don't have to resize and rebuild the structure manually. This presentation describes the functionality of Auto Alter and how it is used to tune your GBPs.  You will learn how to size your structures correctly,  how Auto Alter works, and how DB2 11 improves the performance of the GBP structures.

This is one capability that performs autonomically to keep your GBPs well tuned with sufficient capacity for long term growth, and to avoid structure full conditions.  Did I say it is easy to implement??!!