Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline

May 5, 2025 Donna Westmoreland

Downtime is costly, impacting productivity, revenue, and customer trust. For retailers and financial institutions, even a few minutes can mean significant losses. This is why enterprises rely on IBM i Db2 for mission-critical systems. IBM i offers 99.999 percent availability, high stability, robust failover strategies, and real-time monitoring to reduce unplanned downtime.

However, planned downtime for critical updates and projects is also necessary. The challenge lies in scheduling this maintenance and upgrades without disrupting business applications. So, how can we utilize new functionality and optimize systems with minimal disruption?

Database File Updates

It is not surprising that businesses tend to put off tasks that require Db2 database file changes, no matter how beneficial they can be. After all, changing the structure of a database is the most sensitive type of change, and handling complex file structures requires extra care and a lot of preparation. Too many times, organizations conclude that the potential hours, or even days, of disruption are not worth it.

Fortunately, it is possible to make critical database updates not only manageable but also an integral part of our routine with MDRapid, a unique database transformation solution from Midrange Dynamics. This solution allows for the reorganization of table data to optimize performance, addressing deleted records, converting DDS files to SQL DDL, adding or changing database fields, performing field expansion, and leveraging the efficiency of partitioned tables, all while significantly minimizing business risk.

Database Reorgs With Minimal Downtime

MDRapid is designed to minimize downtime for Db2 database file changes for IBM i applications. MDRapid deploys database changes quickly, even for multi-million and multi-billion record files that have significant update activity.

Imagine the possibilities!

During the change staging, users are unaffected as applications stay active. Data transformation is done in the background, even days in advance of scheduled production change, so you can take as long as you need. You can schedule your changeover for production during planned small downtime window. Users can still access databases while data changes are underway, only needing to exit the application briefly at the end.

You can convert or reorganize large files or split them into partitioned tables while applications remain active and available. MDRapid executes these operations in a pre-staged, temporary environment while keeping the production application live and untouched.

Let us delve into a few technical details and use cases.

MDRapid handles database updates within a staging environment. It replicates live data, monitors journal transactions, and maps these transactions to the new version simultaneously. This ensures data consistency during transformations. Multiple copy threads are available, allowing control over the speed of the data copying process.

Index rebuilding is also done in the background to minimize downtime, even for databases with many indexes. MDRapid allows you to resolve errors before proceeding and validates indexes and views to prevent missing files. It also supports concurrent updates across multiple libraries or schemas, helping organizations maintain consistency. The utilization of workload groups and subsystem controls allows for the management of the impact of index builds on system performance.

For enterprises hitting the 1.6 billion record limit on a table, MDRapid supports transitioning to SQL partitioned tables. This extends capacity 256-fold and is achieved with minimal disruption.

To support field-level data transformation, MDRapid enables column-level data transformations using SQL syntax. Developers can incorporate intrinsic functions, user-defined functions, or custom rules for transforming data inline during background copy operations, saving additional scripting time.

Avoid Post-Install Complications

You can rest easily knowing that changes are fully tested. Using MDRapid you can easily maintain a fully isolated testing environment that mimics production, allowing comprehensive testing for test cases and large record sets. This reduces risks of deployment errors.

Advanced pre-copy and post-copy actions enable customization before and after data transfers. For example, you can execute operations like field encryption or table partitioning before bulk copying data. Running tasks after copying but before syncing optimizes workflow efficiency.

MDRapid automates quick object transfers for production updates. It moves live tables to a backup library and deploys new tables, with data and indexes in place to application libraries, reducing downtime to seconds.

MDRapid protects your business by maintaining changes in a secure staging environment. In case of interruptions like hardware issues, power outages, or subsystem terminations, you can easily restart the conversion process. The data in the staging library can be reviewed one last time before final production.

If anything goes wrong as you move the new files into production, robust installation and rollback capabilities protect your production environment, and you can roll back to your original production file structure.

Complete Control and Peak Performance

Concerned about system resources? Using smart CPU and job management to allocate specific processors to MDRapid prevents excessive CPU usage and enables balancing system resources. Administrators can define the number of processors MDRapid uses, allowing optimized resource allocation. Processes can be paused or resumed as necessary, ensuring minimal interference with live application performance. In case of unplanned outages, such as power loss, the system resumes from its last checkpoint.

MDRapid employs multiple job threads to copy data concurrently, reducing deployment prep time by up to 70%. You can separate jobs for copying and monitoring to streamline CPU and memory usage.

MDRapid offers multiple options and IDEs for you to work with database objects, such as green screens, RDI, Visual Studio Code, commands, and REST APIs.

A centralized console tracks progress across all libraries and environments. It provides detailed metrics, such as data transformation status, number of records processed, and estimated completion times.

Deployment processes can be thoroughly tested in development and user test environments. These processes can then be applied across various partitions and environments to ensure consistency and efficiency.

Real-World Impact

Without MDRapid, you could encounter issues such as partial testing in non-production environments, incomplete bug detection, and extended downtimes during rollback. By creating a fully synchronized test environment and ensuring rapid deployment, MDRapid enhances confidence in database changes, supports modernization efforts, and enables frequent updates with minimal operational disruption.

MDRapid’s powerful benefits have been a game-changer for IBM i shops throughout the world since its initial release. It is easy to integrate MDRapid into your day-to-day operations, minimizing downtime and mitigating risk with unmatched performance, control, and flexibility in data migration and transformation. Best of all, what was once impossible is now attainable. Moving to modern, efficient database architecture becomes easier to plan and achieve.

MDRapid Includes Powerful MDTransform

Complex SQL syntax and conversion programs can become a thing of the past with MDTransform. This handy tool helps you quickly map and manage database file changes, and it even generates SQL scripts. If it is possible in an INSERT SQL statement it is possible in MDTransform.

Automate IBM i Database Modernization and Field Expansion

Functioning as a data transformation engine, MDTransform enhances the capabilities of MDRapid. With MDTransform you can confidently manage field expansions, initializing new fields, merging fields, and manage deployment of DDS to DDL conversions. It also handles field-type changes with ease.

MDTransform guides you through the steps to easily add and populate new fields or update field content. Behind the scenes, it builds and executes a dynamic SQL INSERT statement to populate the new version of the file.

Data transformation results are validated during the compile phase to avoid surprises during installation. You can view, customize, and validate conversion results when transformation occurs.

Build and Refresh Test Data Automatically

Providing reliable test data is critical for any test plan. MDTransform uses Data Copy Templates to identify selection criteria for building and maintaining test data. Select which files, and which records in the file, you need.

Development and QA teams can quickly refresh data whether it resides on the same or different partitions. Templates may be saved, copied, and reused, and data transfer can occur dynamically or be scheduled for periodic refreshes. MDTransform can even initiate column-specific masking of confidential data.

Donna Westmoreland is chief technology officer at Midrange Dynamics North America.

This content is sponsored by MDNA.

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