Chapter 19. Data Sharing

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Data Sharing Benefits

• Data Sharing Requirements

• The DB2 Coupling Facility

• Data Sharing Naming Conventions

• Data Sharing Administration

• Data Sharing Application Development Guidelines

• Data Sharing Administration Guidelines

DB2 data sharing allows applications running on multiple DB2 subsystems to concurrently read and write to the same data sets. Simply stated, data sharing enables multiple DB2 subsystems to behave as one.

DB2 data sharing is optional; it need not be implemented. Check with your DBA or system administrator if you are not sure if data sharing is used in your organization.

Prior to DB2 V4, the only methods available for sharing DB2 data across subsystems were through distributed DB2 connections or using shared read only databases (using the ROSHARE option when creating databases). However, both of these options have drawbacks. The distributed option requires coding changes and the ROSHARE option supported read only access (and is no longer available as of DB2 V6).