You should be aware of functionality that is deprecated or discontinued in DB2® Version 9.7 that can affect the upgrade of your DB2 server. Also, you should be aware of the DB2 products that are no longer supported because upgrade from these products to DB2 Version 9.7 is unsupported.
To deal with these functionality changes, you must perform additional tasks before or after upgrade. The majority of these tasks are pre-upgrade or post-upgrade tasks for DB2 servers. The following list describes changes that are not included in the pre-upgrade and post-upgrade tasks for DB2 servers:
The Control Center tools have been deprecated in DB2 Version 9.7 and might be discontinued in a future release. See Control Center tools and DB2 administration server (DAS) have been deprecated for a completed list of the tools that have been deprecated.
Start using IBM® Data Studio and IBMOptim™ tools. For a mapping between these recommended tools and Control Center tools, see Table of recommended tools versus Control Center tools.
Netscape is no longer a supported Web browser for First Steps and the installation launchpad. If Netscape is set up as your default Web browser, running First Steps will return the DBI1435E error message.
Setup a supported Web browser as the default Web browser before running First Steps or the installation launchpad. See a list of supported Web browsers in the installation requirements for DB2 servers and clients by operating system at Installation requirements for DB2 database products.
Type-1 indexes have been discontinued in DB2 Version 9.7 and are marked invalid during database upgrade. See Converting type-1 indexes to type-2 indexes for details on how to avoid the overhead of automatic index rebuild after the database upgrade.
Partitioned databases are no longer supported on Windows 32-bit operating systems in DB2 Version 9.7. The need for partitioned databases to run on 32-bit operating systems has been reduced because of the adoption of 64-bit processors.
You can upgrade a partitioned database from a pre-Version 9.7 release on Windows 32-bit operating systems by migrating first to DB2 Version 9.5 64-bit database product and then upgrading to DB2 Version 9.7 64-bit database product. See Migrating DB2 32-bit servers to 64-bit systems (Windows) for details.
DB2 Version 9.7 is not supported on RHEL 4 and SLES 9. You must upgrade your operating systems to a supported level before attempting to upgrade to DB2 Version 9.7. See Best practices for upgrading DB2 servers for details about upgrading your operating systems to a newer version.
Review Upgrade impact from DB2 command changes to learn what commands are deprecated and discontinued in DB2 Version 9.7 and how to manage this impact on your database applications and routines.
The use of raw devices for database logging has been deprecated since DB2 Version 9.1 and will be removed in a future release. You should use a file system instead of a raw device. Using a file system with non-buffered I/O capabilities enabled, such as Concurrent I/O (CIO) or Direct I/O (DIO), can give you performance comparable to that of using raw devices. The following example illustrates how to change the newlogpath parameter setting to a file system directory:
db2 UPDATE DATABASE CONFIGURATION USING newlogpath /disk2/newlogdir
The new setting does not become effective until the database is in a consistent state and all users are disconnected from the database. The database manager moves the logs to the new location after the first user connects to the database.
Certain Net Search Extender (NSE) features and commands have been deprecated and might be discontinued in a future release. See Net Search Extender features and commands have been deprecated for details on how to start using equivalent features or commands.
For NSE environments with comparative small workloads, if you are not using these deprecated features or commands, consider migrating to DB2 Text Search to take advantage of functionality not supported in NSE such as linguistic processing in all supported languages and search improvements on XML documents. See Migration to DB2 Text Search for details.