tableEXTENZ improves access from DB2

As more and more newly developed Java applications come on line, they demand more and more access from your mainframe DB2 systems. Even though you're no longer developing on your mainframe system, the operating costs are rising. In all cases like this, these are significant increases in I/O access to DB2 systems. In some cases, the performance of the Java applications is affected.

tableEXTENZ allows you to control costs on your mainframe side, and permits continued growth of your DB2-data-hungry Java applications on your distributed side. By trading excessive I/O accesses for faster and cheaper memory accesses, cost can be sharply reduced, and performance can be improved significantly.

For more information, see:

Java-Access Optimization white paper

Figure 1: Resource usage improvements

tableEXTENZ allows you to extend tableBASE over all of the LPARs within your SysPlex environment.

While it is possible to use tableBASE by itself across multiple LPARs within a Sysplex, it is a precarious management task. With Read-Write tables, it can be a challenge to maintain data consistency across LPARs. There are methods to accomplish this, but they are likely to introduce significant overhead, and would compromise the inherent tableBASE performance advantage.

With tableEXTENZ and VTS Manager, you can organize your Read-Only data in multiple LPARs within a Sysplex. By loading all tables from source tables in a VSAM LDS, you can guarantee that data used on different LPARs will be consistent.

Figure 2: Shared tables across LPARs

Workflow complexities

Maintaining large complex systems can be daunting, and maintaining large numbers of in-memory tables doesn't make it any easier. Standard in-memory table refreshing can occur in the middle of a transaction, and many organizations will only allow refreshes during downtime for this reason. Further, the sequential nature of table refreshing means that significant delays can be experienced in environments with large numbers of tables.

For these reasons and more, organizations will often use a separate LPAR for table change management, which adds an extra expense to the process, along with another layer of complexity.

Workflow improvements using tableEXTENZ and VTS Manager

VTS Manager with tableEXTENZ introduces new automation features that will make this process much easier to manage. Your production and update environments can be on the same LPAR, and can use exactly the same naming conventions; there will no longer be a need for extra LPARs dedicated to testing tables.

Table updates can be performed in the background while transactions are being processed on current tables. Updated tables can then be switched in real time, into the production environment without the need for restarting applications, and without interrupting current transactions. Users will not be affected by data updates.

Figure 3: Improved Workflow

tableEXTENZ is DataKinetics' new solutions product. It consists of a few component products: