Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Archive Report

Where I work we have a process that bi-monthly generates a mksysb then archives it to TSM. Recently an attempt to use an archived mksysb found that sometimes the mksysb process does not create a valid file, but it is still archived to TSM. So the other AIX admins asked me to generate a report that would show the amount of data that was archived and on what date it occurred. Now I would have told them it was impossible if they had asked for data from the backup table, but our archive table is not as large as the backups so I gave it a go.

First problem was determining the best table(s) to use. I could use the summary table, but it doesn't tell me what schedule ran and some of these UNIX servers do have archive schedules other than the mksysb process. The idea I came up with was to query the contents table and join it with the archive table using the object_id field.  Here's an example of the command:

select a.node_name, a.filespace_name, a.object_id, cast((b.file_size/1048576)as integer(9,2))AS SIZE_MB , cast((a.ARCHIVE_DATE)as date) as ARCHIVE from archives a, contents b where a.node_name=b.node_name and a.filespace_name='/mksysb_apitsm' and a.filespace_name=b.filespace_name and a.object_id=b.object_id and a.node_name like 'USA%'

This select takes at least 20 hours to run across 6 TSM servers. I guess that I should be happy it returns at all, but TSM is DB2! It should be a lot faster, so I am wondering if I could clean up the script or add something that would make the index the data faster??? I am considering dropping the "like" and just matching node_name between the two tables. Would putting node_name matching first then matching object_id be faster? Would I be better off running it straight out of DB2? Suggestions appreciated.

2 comments:

  1. Have you thought about squirting your query direct into the DB2 back end? You could use more advanced SQL then which may go faster. You may find more useful info there too. I've done it before to drill down to get data quantities for active/inactive/deleted backup data which I couldn't find through the normal TSM views, but it's been a while.

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  2. That's what I am wanting to do, but I need a command similar to the table and column listing select that would work in DB2.

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