Introduction In the last blog on Ansible and z/OS we talked a bit about how we went about extending Ansible to provide some additional capabilities around Db2 for z/OS DDF Aliases. As promised at the end of that blog, this one will cover how to go about creating a collection of modules, and how to publish this on Ansible Galaxy to make it available to everyone else!   Why Create a Collection? When you have a number of modules that deliver capability around a particular idea – we’re looking at Db2 for z/OS Production Access Path Modelling – then this is a way to package these and make them ..read more

Introduction In my previous blog articles on Db2 Pacemaker HA clusters (which you can find here and here), I demonstrated how these clusters can be put together, configured and used in the most resilient way. Or at least I thought so at the time – the testing of the transactional workload’s behaviour during a failover showed that the first transaction to happen at the time or after the failover would invariably fail with the error: SQL30108N A connection failed in an automatic client reroute environment. The transaction was rolled back. This meant that, even if the remote client connections co ..read more

It’s pretty straightforward surely? You take a backup and then restore it get back to some point of consistency. Not necessarily just in Production but maybe a test environment; set the data up as you want it, run a bunch of tests which trash the data, then put it back to that baseline position so you can do another set of tests. Or, more exactly, recover to a point part way through the tests, so that you don’t have to re-run all the initial bits that you already know work. Or, in a Production environment, that dreaded 0:dark thirty call that says “someone has deleted x,000 rows or corrupted a ..read more

This eBook expands and improves on my earlier blog series, ‘Db2 for z/OS-locking for Application Developers’. It focuses on the role of the application programmer in collaborating with the locking mechanisms provided by Db2 to ensure data integrity. It’s also relevant to application designers, database administrators, and Db2 systems programmers. The book covers a lot of ground, including the theoretical underpinnings of database locking, and the practical implications of various application programming strategies, especially in OLTP environments. Hopefully it will be of use to you in your da ..read more

In my previous eBook, I showed how to configure a Pacemaker HADR cluster and how the remote client connections behaved in various Pacemaker/HADR setups (with and without VIP and/or ACR). However, back then I didn’t experiment at all with the separate quorum devices, which is the recommended approach for production workloads, and I made a promise (to myself and you ) to do that testing at a later stage and share the results with you. So, trying to stay true to my word, I’ve just done the installation and the configuration of yet another Pacemaker/HADR cluster, this time in a cloudy AWS env ..read more

Introduction An Ansible module is a way of extending the existing capabilities and functionality of Ansible. Whilst there is already a huge amount of content available to us with the core capabilities and extended collections, we might want to add a module to provide a capability that doesn’t already exist, or that we could only make available with a long and complex role. An Ansible module should be focused on delivering coverage of a single thing – i.e. in the example below, Db2 DDF information. A single module covering everything that we might want to do with Db2, MQ and CICS functionality ..read more

In the second blog in this series (Messing with JSON data in Db2 part 2), I suggested that I was going to “go through the same processes and use the same data but do it in MySQL”. So, this is Part 3, but using a different flavour of database. In essence, I wanted to satisfy myself that I can: take the same body of data ( a set of JSON docs relating to FitBit activity data ) load it into my database post-process it (build additional columns with reformatted data values) and then export it to a flat-file and load it into Excel and view aggregated data.   Define the table Almost, but not q ..read more

Introduction SQLite is an application embeddable SQL database. It is not intended as a networked highly scalable enterprise solution like Db2 for z/OS, but rather as an application local data store. Note that Python – including Open Enterprise SDK Python for z/OS – includes SQLite, so the database that we create can be queried and analysed by Python tooling. It’s worth noting that the implementation of the database is written to a single file, so copying and archiving is fairly straight forward, but handling large data volumes is probably best done with Db2 or IMS! The SQLite documentation inc ..read more

A few years ago there was a concerted attempt to get zPDT running under Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux V2 (run Linux inside Windows), but it ultimately ended in stalemate because we couldn’t get the license key manager working. Having taken another run at this a few weeks ago and got it working, I thought I’d share what I did. My environment: Machine : ASUS fx507, pimped to 64GB RAM and 1TB m2 SSD External Crucial X9 Pro 2G SSD – v fast! Windows 11 Home 22H2 – Build 22621.2428 WSL2 (“wsl –version” reports 1.2.5.0) running Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) (“wsl –list –all –verbose” reports running on ..read more

Introduction A little while back, we started working with Python, the Z Open Automation (ZOA) Utilities and Ansible to get some neat automation examples running on z/OS. There are lots of things that we like about Ansible – its fact gathering, stateful approach and large and enthusiastic development community make it incredibly useful for reliable deployment automation. Since IBM has become involved (cf z/OS Core, Hardware Management Console, z/OSMF, CICS, IMS, System Automation plus lots of storage goodness), the z/OS platform has enjoyed some DevOps focus. New releases of the Ansible collect ..read more