Cloning of DB2 databases and tablespaces is a sophisticated and error prone process. Lots of input statements for the utilities must be tailored, jobs have to be scheduled and if you want to refresh an existing environment you have to be sure that the structures of the objects are compatible. But the biggest pain is the runtime. Conventional methods like UNLOAD/LOAD require a lot of CPU time and IO. The copy process takes hours and days. This implicates that the copy process cannot be done in the limited batch window. The constantly increasing amount of data makes it more difficult to do copies in a regular way.

BCV5|6 is a cloning tool for DB2 on z/OS. It is able to copy databases/tablespace within a subsystem or into another subsystem. The highly integrated process makes it easy to perform a DB2 copy on demand, but also in scheduled environments. It breaks down the runtime of the copy jobs to fit into your batch window, but it also saves a lot of money.

Saves 90 % Elapsed Time

BCV5|6 saves about 90 percent of elapsed time compared against DSN1COPY. This dramatic saving is achieved, because BCV5|6 has an integrated copy facility which is highly optimized. It works in parallel, copies indexes and is able to perform OBID translation.

Additionally BCV5|6 copies the RUNSTATS information from source to target, so a separate CPU intensive RUNSTATS run against the target objects is not required.

Saves 90 % CPU Time 

Although the integrated copy program performs the OBID translation it still saves 90 % CPU time compared against UNLOAD/LOAD. The program works on VSAM dataset level and copies the data directly from the source to the target DB2, without having the necessity to store the data twice like UNLOAD. BCV5|6 internally does not process the data row wise, but page wise, which is much more efficient.

Saves 90 % Manual Efforts

The included ISPF interface lets you easily setup a copy task. The complete copy process is divided into a job chain of 6 JCL jobs that are automatically generated by BCV5. Once you have defined the copy process, BCV5|6 handles everything for you. You do not have to worry about cryptical copy statements, or different structures of source and target, anymore. Even if your shop copies from image copy, BCV5|6 automatically selects the correct image copies and uses it as input for the copy process.