Overview of ALTER and BMC AMI Change Manager for Db2

In addition, the growing complexity of the Db2 environment has made the change process itself more difficult and costly. Without an effective change management tool, database administrators (DBAs) find that data structure changes and change management is complex, tedious, resource intensive, and error prone.

For more information, view the Quick Course CHANGE MANAGER for DB2 - Getting Started.

Change management

Every organization, every environment, and every application is unique. Before you can use change management tools to help you manage changes to your data structures and your data, you might need to consider the following questions:

• What does my environment look like?
• Where are my environments located?
• How are my changes propagated?
• When are my changes propagated?

Identification of your environment

Most organizations use at least three environments for each of their applications: development, test, and production.

What does your environment look like? Perhaps you maintain your application code and perform unit tests in a development system. Your test system might be used to perform system and stress tests, as well as simulate production. Your production system might be in single or multiple locations.

Location of your environment

Sometimes multiple environments are located on the same Db2 subsystem.

The same Db2 subsystem can be used for multiple environments if you use different database names and you have different owners. Where are your environments located? Are they located on the same subsystem? Do they share DASD? Are they located in different cities or in different parts of the world?

Propagation of your changes

In some organizations, multiple teams are responsible for developing or maintaining an application in a development environment.

If the changes to the data structures are needed by each team, you might need to synchronize the data structures in the development environment before you migrate the entire structure to the test environment. How will you propagate these changes? Do you manage your change requests based on release cycles or by date?

One way to manage your development, test, and production environments is as follows:

• If you need to create an environment, you can migrate your data structures and data.
• If the environment already exists, you can compare one environment to another to determine what changes need to be made to synchronize the data structures in both of the environments.
• You can create, alter, or drop data structures in the environment, or simply maintain the environment.

 

For example, you could create your development environment based on your production environment or synchronize your development environment with your production environment. To create your development environment, you could migrate your production environment. To synchronize your development environment with your production environment, you could compare your development environment to the production environment. After your development environment is established, you could modify it or maintain it.

Overview of change management with ALTER and Change Manager

BMC provides two products to help you manage data structures and data for Db2 subsystems: the ALTER and Change Manager products.

This section contains the following topics: