Db2 – What are the available options to backup DB2 Express-C

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.

DB2 shouldn't have issues at all with storage of large files. Some of how you store them will depend on what exactly you are storing. Are you storing XML files? Large text files? Word documents or PDFs? Video? Audio?

You have several options available to you. Graphic strings, binary strings, your large objects (CLOB, BLOB, and DBCLOB), and just plain XML.

If you are using just character data I would side with a CLOB. But check your sizes, if you are consistently lower than 32K it might just be better to use a VARCHAR. (Reason being is that large objects in DB2 are stored outside the table by default (unless you use the INLINE option, but even then it only works to certain sizes of LOBs), and they are also not cached in bufferpools. DB2 always retreives LOB's straight from disk (unless they are INLINE'd as mentioned above). If you are storing XML documents, you might want to look into the XML type as DB2 has a more optimal way to store and retrieve XML. You can set up special XML indexes on XML types too. And you can query the XML using SQL/XML or XQuery using XPath.

If you are storing binary objects, then I'd go with BLOB.

I think you may be right about the compression piece. (Although it wouldn't hurt to test it. There are about four or five different compression levels in DB2 and I know I can do at least backup compression with 9.7 Express-C).

Here is a 10.1 Edition comparison chart. And here is a article on the different editions and what they all offer.

Also take a look at space requirements for tables to help you better pick what you need.