Even in today’s cloud-obsessed environment, the speed and efficiency of the mainframe remain peerless. According to research from IBM, mainframes power 68% of the world’s production IT workloads while incurring just 6% of costs, and 70% of the Global 500 continue to choose the mainframe for their most mission-critical demands. That’s not to say that mainframes can’t run into performance issues, however, and one particular threat looms large.

Db2 in a BIND

Every time an application within Db2 is pre-compiled, a Database Relational Module (DBRM) is created. The BIND PACKAGE command gets the Db2 application program from the DBRM source code stage into its associated Db2 system as a PACKAGE, or executable machine code.

With mainframe development teams comprised of hundreds or even thousands of developers, all compiling several times each day and five days a week, thousands of package versions are created. Only some of these packages are used, but the rest remain, cluttering up your Db2 Catalog and causing application performance issues that can impact your entire organization.

The DB/IQ PackMan tool was designed to clean up your Db2 Catalog and get rid of unnecessary packages, similar to the way you used to have to defrag a Windows hard drive to increase accessibility. PackMan doesn’t just establish which Db2 packages can be freed. It can efficiently scan large load libraries of tens of thousands of modules, even when individual modules are 16Mb or larger, and it supports all types of hosting languages including PL/I, Cobol, ASM, C and C++.

When a medium-sized insurance company of 2,500 employees and 760 offices implemented PackMan, the tool freed 50% of package versions and removed 15 million rows from commonly used Explain tables in just the first week. As a result, BIND CPU-times were reduced and the integrity of the company’s Db2 applications was ensured.

Download our latest whitepaper titled “With a Mainframe Skills Gap Amidst a Global Pandemic, Effective People, Processes, and Systems are Critical Now More Than Ever” for tips to help maintain application code quality within your DevOps strategy and amidst the mainframe skills gap. For more information and a free trial of DB/IQ PackMan, please click here.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn
Share
Follow by Email