Managing database object changes by using the Properties view

Changing a database requires determining which changes need to be made, specifying those changes, evaluating the effects of those changes, and then deploying them.

Databases are frequently changed for various reasons. For example, new or changed applications might require you to create new objects or change existing objects. Or, perhaps performance can be improved by adding new indexes or changing buffer pool sizes.

The Database Administration feature of IBM® Data Studio provides a consistent way to create, alter, and drop objects and to manage the privileges for those objects for various types of database servers. The supported database servers include IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, IBM DB2 for z/OS®, IBM DB2 for i, IBM Informix® Dynamic Server, and some non-IBM databases.

The contents that are displayed in the Properties view are editable. You use the Properties view to define the attributes of a new object, to change the attributes of an existing object, and to manage privileges. As you use the Properties view to modify an object's attributes, you can compare the object with the object as it is currently defined in the database catalog. The ability to compare the object before and after changes makes it easier to visualize the changes that you are making. You can drop objects by using menu actions in the Object List or the Data Source Explorer.

In addition, you can use impact analysis features to determine which objects might be impacted by the objects that you are changing.

After you have defined your changes, you use IBM Data Studio to automatically generate the commands to run against the database catalog. The generated commands are displayed in the Review and Deploy dialog, where you can review the commands.

You can choose to deploy the generated commands immediately to the database, or you can open the commands in the SQL and XQuery editor. In the editor, you can edit and run the DDL, or start the Job Manager. The Job Manager is useful for scheduling a time to run the command script whether you edited the commands or not.

More robust change management features are provided for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows databases because a change plan is used to manage the changes. A change plan makes more complex changes possible and enables you to change more than one object at a time. When you use a change plan, you also edit object attributes in the Properties view and run the automatically generated commands from the Review and Deploy dialog.


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