Another funny word... Maxi-flop

Where does he come up with this stuff?

From your DB2 Command Line Processor issue the following SQL command:

db2 GET DATABASE CONFIGURATION

If you really want to you can issue this command in the command editor. Just remember to peel off the db2 (but you knew that already). You could also go mucking around in system tables, but you might end up clicking somewhere and locking something just before wandering off to find a danish or a bearclaw or something, only to come back to klaxons whirling and everyone in your department looking sternly at you as their applications start failing, which would really put a damper on the day right after you already had to settle for a jelly donut, which in turn chose that moment to settle its filling on your new shirt (a little club soda should get that out).

You'd better think quick and find an excuse for accessing system tables through the command editor and not the CLP. I would recommend blaming the current system for managing logins and permissions. I mean seriously who should have access beyond read only to system tables. That sort of permission should require documents signed in triplicate before being used and should not be used except when there exists a compelling need to use those logins. This is the sort of thing that leads to all sort of failures and exposures. It is integral to the most basic of information security plans. Trust me I am NSTISSI-4011 INFOSEC and CNSS-4012 Senior Systems Manager certified. I'll show you. They came on parchment in a nice padded presentation portfolio same as the Bachelor's degree I have that says database administration and Summa Cum Laude on it.

But I digress. I really wanted to show you something about DB2. The something I wanted to show you was the MAXFILOP setting. The MAXFILOP setting is the maximum number of files open that a database agent can have. If the database agent opens more some get closed. This can cause problems with performance. Of course in DB2 V 9.5 we can omit the word agent from the previous statements because version 9.5 supports multithreading in non-windows environments such as IBM's flagship non-mainframe OS AIX (hip hip hooray). Version 9.5 also has a respectable Max(MAXFILOP) for AIX 61,440 compared to a wimpy 1950 in the de facto "not-V 9.5" linked earlier for MAXFILOP. We can discuss knowledge base articles and marketing engineers some other time when I can provide more solid foundational evidence for the strategic placement of knowledge in white papers (Don't even get me started, but, wow, Juniper's whole "software can be updated, and hardware gets replaced, therefore there is a better business case for hardware routers", is classic {note that this, does in fact, evaluate true so long as "business case" is defined properly}), support pages, and RedBooks (not that one, though it is full of marketing, most is slightly more obvious than the one's I mean).

Anyway,... just make sure you leave enough in your maxi-flop for SMS because it is going to need a little something extra if it is going to do all the tedious bits and boggles for you. Remind me someday to paraphrase the diffferences between SMS and DMS for you, maybe there'll be car chases ( ○╩○ wee-ew wee-ew ○≡○ vroom erreerr wahhhnnnhhh) and ninjas (☻ hee -yawh).

Concurrent or Subsequent

And now for some engineering prose, and a single capricious act of lexicographic prescriptivism:

Gantt chart planning and analysis as applied to information systems requires that concurrent tasks not be considered concurrent should the finite reality of system resources necessitate that concurrency inflate competitive consumption of said resources.

In cases where concurrency is applied without due consideration for system resource limitations the net resource hours consumed in the satisfaction of milestones predictably exceed predicted quantities.

In the spirit of concisely describing the phenomena of concurrent competitive consumption of system resources, I will coin the verb floofnoggle, meaning "to miss a deadline owing to the sharing of a deadline without adequate network and computational resources to share among deadline sharing tasks."

Today I floofnoggled on a SQL deliverable; there was just too much database locking activities for adequate integrated testing.

I may at sometime in the future expand on the notion of floofnoggling by attempting to quantize aspects of it. I know that consumption of resources cannot exceed the limit imposed by the finiteness of system resources (or in DB2 V 9.5 the limit imposed by user specific throttling). I know that the more specifically aligned data items utilized in concurrent scheduled tasks the greater the probability of locks, and subsequently deadlocks. Also worth noting is the MAXFILOP (DB2) setting for the database.

It would be sagacious for a project manager creating a schedulables plan (i.e. a Gantt chart) to incorporate into the estimations of resource hours and planning of the concurrency of tasks a table of system resources necessary for the completion of each task to determine if concurrency is necessarily an appropriate option.