Highlights of Db2 11.5

IBM® Db2 11.5 offers database efficiency, simplicity, and reliability in the form of new features and enhancements that address a wide variety of business requirements. Comprehensive enterprise security, simplified installation and deployment, better usability and adoption, a streamlined upgrade process, enhancements to large databases, and vast improvements to BLU Acceleration are the key benefits that this technology delivers.

4K sector support

Db2 11.5 now offers support for storage devices that use a 4KB sector size in production environments. For details, see the DB2_4K_DEVICE_SUPPORT registry variable.

Improved security through host-based firewall enablement

In a multi-node environment, Db2 will need to run commands on remote nodes for certain operations. The registry variable DB2_FIREWALL_PORT_RANGE will ensure that this cross-node communication will be performed using ports in the range specified. This registry variable is supported for single-node, DPF, and pureScale Db2 configurations.

Improved CF recovery time

On all Db2 pureScale configurations, CF recovery is faster in public Ethernet failure scenarios.

SQL insert and update statement optimizations

SQL based insert and update statements for columnar tables are optimized to support large data sets efficiently, and encoding dictionary creation for such operations are also optimized.

New monitoring metrics

For determining failure rate of SQL statements, It is now possible to monitor the failure rate of an SQL statement using the MON_GET_PKG_CACHE_STMT table function.

New monitoring interfaces

For workloads at the service superclass level, it is now possible to examine monitor data without having to manually aggregate data across all service subclasses within a service superclass.

Automatic Re-compress feature for columnar tables

If an insert operation is used to populate a columnar table, automatic creation of the compression dictionaries begin once a threshold count of rows are inserted into the table. This design ensures that a large enough sample of rows exists to build dictionaries that yield an adequate compression ratio. The Automatic Re-compress feature for tables uses the new compression daemon to asynchronously check for tables that contain rows that have not been compressed at the front of the table. It then re-compresses those rows in place which may leave empty extents in the table. The feature runs online, concurrent with other insert, update, delete, and select transactions. In addition to improving space utilization, it will also improve query performance which is more efficient processing encoded data. As a result, queries will run faster on a table where the front part of the table has been re-compressed with the dictionary. The Automatic Re-compress feature requires no user intervention, and uses the REORG TABLE command with a new RECOMPRESS option to re-compress the rows. For simplicity, this feature is fully automated and manual execution of this RECOMPRESS option is not supported.

Call Level Interface (CLI) driver enhancements

The Db2 11.5 release includes the following enhancements and new capabilities for the CLI driver:
  • Data movement using cliload with an External Table
  • Ability to generate a unique utility id for zload
  • Db2dsdriver.cfg support in MS ODBC Administrator
  • Enhancement to the WLB/ACR algorithm
  • Server side enablement of WLB/ACR for Db2 pureScale server

A technical preview: Advanced Log Space Management

You can reduce your likelihood of hitting transaction log full conditions with Advanced Log Space Management (ALSM). This technical preview is currently intended for non-production environments. For details, see Db2 Version 11.5 - Advanced Log Space Management - Tech Preview.