DB2 Autonomic Computing

One of the highlights of DB2 Version 9.5 is “Manage your business, not your database”. IBM claims that the DB2 autonomic computing environment is self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting. Autonomic computing is not new in Version 9.5. Past several releases of DB2 have consistently added enhancements in this direction. Just look at the database and database manager configuration parameters in Version 8.1, 8.2, 9 and 9.5 and you can see a trend of how more and more configuration parameters have started supporting the AUTOMATIC setting. Some of the other important features under autonomic computing are Self-tuning memory manager, Automatic storage, Automatic database backup, Automatic statistics collection, Configuration advisor, Health monitor and Utility throttling.

However, somehow I feel that not all the autonomic features in DB2 are widely used. For example, most of the DB2 DBAs are taking their database backup using scheduled scripts rather than using the Automatic database backup. It would be interesting to know which autonomic features are really getting embraced and which ones are not so popular. So, I have added a poll (on the right side panel of my blog) to check which DB2 autonomic features you use in your environment. You can select more than one options in this poll. Also, it would be great if you can provide comments here about why you like or dislike a particular autonomic computing feature.