DB2 High Performance Design and Tuning

Rating:
Summary: Falls Short
Review: Book gives a great over view and lays out a common sense approach to performance. Each chapter opens up talking a good game but then falls short of the expectations that it has set.

Book falls short by not covering the SQL Optimizer, how it works, or how to change the pre-bind parameters to influence it. Covers DB2 version 5-6 and mentions some things coming along in version 7. Book lists "Hints" but does not give definitions for each one nor the behavior that it should invoke.

Performance tools, techniques, scripts, screenshots are all from the mainframe environment. The event monitor GUI on the windows 200 interface tells you how code is actually behaving instead of the SETEXPLAIN which makes estimates and guesses. The book never mentions the event monitor tool. (I like books that cover different implimentations.)

Considering that this is the only performance book available for DB2, it's the best. I have an older Oracle performance book that most of my SQL Tuning/modeling techniques are based on. This DB2 book doesn't compare in depth or breadth.

If your new to DB2 or to Tuning, this book could help you out.
If you already know Tuning or another database, read the DB2 RedBooks at ibm.com, they're free.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Yevich tells all
Review: Now that I have your attention -- I must confess I have not yet seen this book. But Richard Yevich has consulted my organization on a complex DB2 system, and I would say that his collaboration on this book should guarantee useful insights.

Note that this book will likely be only for an mainframe environment. For Unix or NT, I would go with a book on the DB2 UDB version.

Rating:
Summary: DB2 High Performance Design and Tuning
Review: This text has more insight than any other text I have read on tuning a mainframe DB2 system. The text sometimes seems disjointed, but in trying to cram all of the authors combined knowledge and experience into one text and trying to give it some order, is daunting. I would have to say this text rates a bit higher on the scale than DB2 Developer's Guide by Craig Mullins because it is not trying to cover all of the bases that Mr. Mullins is in his book. This is strictly for giving pointers on tuning DB2 in a mainframe OS/390 environment. I hope the authors combine their efforts and put out a true "DB2 for OS/390 Certification Guide" so we DB2 DBAs can train newcomers to the field. Their latest effort falls short of that.