DB2 Transaction Logs – can they be COPY-PASTE on another Disaster Recovery Server

Wal archive is useful for backup purposes. For example - you make full backup every day, and keep wal segments since last abckup, thanks to this you can always get database to any state that it was during the day (for example - just before someone did run: drop table users cascade;).

Dropping tables will engage the transaction logs. Actually dropping pretty much everything (except a tablespace or a bufferpool) engages the transaction logs.

Couple things that may help you

• Using truncate on each table will drop the data from the table without logging. This only works for tables. Dropping tables and other objects will still log, but truncate would help you cut down on logging.
• Dropping a tablespace (pending you are using your own and not the default IBM provided ones) will automatically drop ANY and ALL objects associated with that tablespace (usually tables), but drops the tables and the data in a way that is not logged. (There is a way to mark a tablespace for recoverable tables, but for the most part you get a clean database table-wise). NOTE: you still have to drop other objects, which will log some.
• Dropping the whole database. This will drop ALL objects immediately without logging.

I guess depending on what you are doing, the second or third points will get you there the quickest. Just remember that anything dropped that does not engage the transaction logs is not recoverable from, without restoring from a backup.

I'd recommend taking a backup before you try any of these as a best practice. You could also use db2look to get the schema changes and db2move to get the schema with data (although I don' think you get any security with either of those). Again, I'd stick to a backup before you try dropping anything.

EDIT: You can indeed get some security with db2look. These are usually the -x and -xdep parameters.