Near continuous availability of data centric applications becomes a reality

With the advancements in DB2 server clustering technologies (both Sysplex and pureScale) and the DB2 Connect client drivers, it is now possible to achieve near continuous application availability. Availability is now no longer about only database server availability, but there is more focus on availability of applications that access the data stored on the server. Having the server up and running is not very meaningful if the applications connected to the server suffer connection failures and downtime. And customers rightfully have come to expect that their local and distributed applications originating from around the world, stay up and running 24X7.

DB2 Connect client driver availability technology has grown leaps and bounds over the last few years – this ensures that applications continue to function in case of server unplanned outages as well as planned outages such as rolling upgrades when members of a DB2 cluster are migrated one by one. Client driver availability algorithms complement server availability technologies to ensure highest availability in a distributed environment. A combination of features around workload balancing and failover have been built into DB2 Connect client drivers. While workload balancing achieves higher throughput by distributing connections and transactions to members with maximum capacity at any point in time, failover reconnects applications to next best available member in case of a connection failure.

In recent releases of DB2 Connect, default values of properties that determine high availability behavior have been changed to values that work well out of the box for majority of customers. Given the number of products in the DB2 stack (application server, client driver, DB2) and myriad high availability knobs at each layer, customers found it difficult to achieve an optimal end-to-end configuration leading to outages that could have been avoided in the fist place. Default value changes also control resource consumption and allow faster recovery from failover. For example, the default value of maxTransportObjets was changed from -1 (unlimited connections) to a more reasonable value of 1000, that prevents runaway applications from creating too many unnecessary connections and deplete system resources.

Number of features were added for easier problem determination in complex high availability setups. For eg, new statistics were introduced to better manage socket connections to clustered DB2. More details were added to the errors that are returned to the application going against a cluster – that provide the application more information on what kind of failover happened and whether the application needs to take further action for a successful transaction. For eg, reason codes and detailed message texts were added to the -30108 error that notifies the application that the transaction did not qualify for a seamless reroute to another DB2 member and that the application should resubmit the transaction for the reroute to occur.

High availability technologies built into the DB2 server and DB2 Connect client drivers complement each other and together have come a long way to satisfy customer's needs for continuous availability of business critical data and applications. To get the most availability for distributed applications, we do recommend you to upgrade DB2 Connect client drivers to the latest available levels.