Db2 – Does DB2 LUW v10.5 Support Windows Authentication and How is it Set

Based on the last above links in my edit to my question I found my answer. I cannot tweak the system account since our logons to our system are from an LDAP and I cannot control the groups and what not.

So I did the following:

1. Opened the DB2 GUI (was easiest to do this way).
2. Connected to the desired database as db2admin.
3. Added my logon to the database as a user.
4. GRANT all authorities to that id (my id).
5. Disconnect.
6. Connect to the desired database as my id.
7. GRANT all authorities to db2admin.
8. Disconnect.

Voila! The db2admin logon now as all authorities.

EDIT: I'm going to leave the above as it helped me learn how to do some interesting stuff in DB2. However, I have learned that the DBADM/SECADM with DATAACCESS and ACCESSCTRL authorities granted the instance owner (in my case the db2admin id) have all the authority needed to interact with the database. I could have actually just commented out those grant lines above in the script. Those were left over from a script which ran against an older version of DB2. I have also found if I need to have the instance owner DBADM after doing a restore to database A from database B, it is easiest just to set the registry variable DB2_RESTORE_GRANT_ADMIN_AUTHORITY to YES (available in Fix Pack 2 and above). Then I don't have to try to grant instance owner DBADM. It automatically is granted that to any database restored into the instance. If you are not at Fix Pack 5, you have to bounce the instance for this to take affect.

Windows Authentication is going to be the most secure means, as opposed to SQL Server Authentication. The reason behind this is because with Windows Authentication, the OS handles the auth as opposed to SQL Server handling it with its respective method.

When you use Windows Auth, SQL Server just uses the authentication token that is stored when you log into Windows (the OS). This token-based security is more secure than SQL Server's native username/password security.

In other words if you can, choose Windows Authentication. There are times though when you cannot get around SQL Server authentication (legacy application, third-party vendor, etc.).