Db2 – Is storing archive logs on local disk and backups on vendor storage possible

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.

As per Information Center:

"If this option is specified when restoring from an online backup image, error SQL2537N will be returned."

So you you are left with rolling forward. That being said, you could try the following

db2 rollforward db mydb to end of backup and complete

According to the information for rollforward command

END OF BACKUP Specifies that all partitions in the partitioned database should be rolled forward to the minimum recovery time. See Examples section below for an example.

This should restore whatever it is you are attempting to restore up to the point of the end of the backup and not include any rolling forward through transactions logs that may be occurring after the backup. Normally you still have to issue at least this statement for a restore from an offline backup where you use archived logs.

I personally haven't tried nor had the need to do an online and only rollforward to the end of the backup. Give it a shot and let us all know what happens.

EDIT: To answer your questions below: You must have archival logging enabled in order to take online backups. You can still take offline backups with archival logging. You do not have to switch back to circular to do so. However, once you have archival logging enabled, regardless of whether you are restoring from an offline or an online backup, you must perform a rollforward when you are done. No way around it. See my own previous question on this.

In order to set up archival logging, you will need to alter the database configuration parameter LOGARCHMETH1. By default, this is set to OFF, which means circular logging. Your choices for it are as follows:

• DISK
• TSM
• USEREXIT
• VENDOR
• LOGRETAIN

LOGRETAIN tells DB2 to leave the archived logs in the logging directory. It will not clean up any of these logs for you (leaving you as the DBA to do so). USEREXIT leaves it up to a non-IBM third party tool to take care of storing and archiving your logs (usually hand coded in C). Not too many people use this anymore from what I understand. DISK and TSM seem to be used a fair amount. DISK tells DB2 where you want to archive your logs off to (although with a few other parameters set, DB2 can automatically clean up logs no longer needed-I'll show you that below). TSM tells DB2 to let IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager to archive off the logs. There are a few other settings you have to get into for that to work. Where I work, we haven't tried that yet. And lastly, VENDOR is used to use a third-party vendor product to archive off your logs.

To set up archival logging of to a different disk spot and have DB2 automatically clean things for you, you can do the following (NOTE:these are in Unix path)

db2 connect to mydb user <admin user> using <admin user password>
#NOTE THE double and single quotes needed on the command line in Unix
db2 "update db cfg using logarchmeth1 'DISK:/dbarch/dblogs'"
db2 update db cfg using num_db_backups 2
db2 update db cfg using rec_his_retentn 2
db2 update db cfg using auto_del_rec_obj on
db2 terminate

This will tell DB2 to keep 2 full backups for at least two full days. Two backups have been kept for two days and another one is taken, the oldest backup will be deleted by DB2. DB2 will also then clean up any logs that were between the now deleted backup and the next oldest retained backup.

Also note: once you switch to archival logging, DB2 will require you to immediately take an offline backup as your next action (ie, the database will be placed into BACKUP PENDING mode) and you will be unable to do anything else until you do so.

Hope this helps!