CA has announced the latest release of its CA Database Management for DB2, used in simplifying management of complex database systems on the mainframe.

Database Management Release 12 for DB2 for z/OS helps streamline database administrative tasks and address application performance issues, said Scott Jessee, VP of database development for CA's mainframe business unit. The ability to ease the task of running database environments "has become particularly crucial as IT resources remain highly constrained," he said in the announcement.

One of the new features allows the tool to identify objects in the database that need maintenance and automatically formulate the actions needed to make the repair. The actions may be deferred until processing demands are low. They can be presented to database administrators for review, or they can be initiated immediately, depending on needs.

Other enhancements include:

• Database Management for DB2 can monitor and analyze data from not only DB2 systems but from Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase. Its analysis of the database function and performance can be displayed in a second product, CA Wily Application Performance Management.
• Release 12 of the tool can assess the impact of SQL statements on database systems' performance.
• It can lower the overhead associated with multitasking in copy jobs, which reduces the time needed to execute a backup.
• It can prevent data loading failures by using a "sliding scale" sizing algorithm to prevent the load from running out of space.

CA also offers a tool for managing mainframe IMS databases, also in its 12th release. It supports IMS Version 11 and improves the performance of both IMS itself and CA products acquiring performance data from IMS. It makes more IMS data available during backups, said Jessee.

Carl Olofson, VP of database management at IDC, commented in the announcement that mainframe database capacity has continued to grow worldwide as enterprise customers continue to scale up their systems to deal with more data. Applying simplifying tools to database management helps IT organizations control their costs, he said in the announcement.

Additional information on mainframe database management will be available at an Oct. 4-9 user group meeting in Rome of DB2 users within the CA customer base.

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