Total Utility Control (TUC) is a powerful framework for the intelligent automation of Db2 for z/OS utilities that automatically optimizes and streamlines the execution of your database maintenance policies.

Designed specifically for database administrators, TUC automates routine object maintenance tasks—especially beneficial in complex Db2 environments with large numbers of objects and stringent availability demands.

With TUC, you can define and/or automate a comprehensive set of maintenance procedures such as backing up data, collecting statistics, reorganizing tables, and recovering data when necessary. Each maintenance task can have unique policies and rules, which may vary across different applications or groups of Db2 objects. For example. by leveraging Real Time Statistics, TUC can identify change rates and trigger maintenance only when objects reach defined thresholds, ensuring just-in-time maintenance, avoiding unnecessary expenditure of CPU resource, and optimizing overall performance and availability of each database.

TUC workflows simplify management by allowing the database administrator to:

• Group related objects such as tables into various profile
• Configure policy rules and thresholds for each profile
• Create reusable utility job templates

Based on these configurations, utility statements are automatically generated for all Db2 objects within a profile – well before it is time to execute them.

At execution time, TUC applies the defined policy rules and thresholds to intelligently determine which utility jobs should be triggered for each object within a profile. It prioritizes job execution according to need and speeds workload processing by parallelizing the processing of profile objects – resulting in faster processing of all profile objects.

TUC comes preconfigured with a default set of rules and procedures that are easily customized to fit your specific environment, enabling quick implementation.

In short, TUC provides a framework that lets users define rules and thresholds that identify objects needing maintenance and then automatically triggers the execution of the appropriate utilities, ensuring efficient, policy-driven database housekeeping.

TUC automation offers the following unique capabilities:

• Seamless integration with application processing flow to trigger utilities at business significant points while exploiting the capabilities of robust, standard enterprise schedulers. TUC allows full integration with application jobs, avoiding collision between utility jobs and application processing, while allowing administrators to remain in control of all utility jobs.
• Automated self-learning processes that group objects together, generate compatible utility statements, trigger processing on demand, avoid unnecessary processing, prioritize object processing based on criticality, balance workloads across multiple parallel jobs and handle preparation and postprocessing actions.
• Flexible customization options that allow administrators to adjust the default setup to easily control utilities, objects and workloads while following local naming conventions and authorization requirements. TUC can be installed out of the box with recommended best practices using optimal options and thresholds, covering existing and newly created objects, and allowing the administrator to immediately exploit the latest functionality provided by utilities.

Shops that will benefit from a TUC implementation include:

• Shops using in-house scripts and homegrown processes that no longer support growing demands, and who are looking for a tool with outstanding automation functionality and vendor support.
• Shops with constrained CPU, batch window time, and DBA resource, looking to decrease the cost of object maintenance by implementing a solution that intelligently and automatically maintains object performance and availability while minimizing CPU consumption, and that helps administrators to do more with less.
• Shops that previously relinquished responsibility for backups, reorgs and statistics collection, and now wish to automatically and non-intrusively regain ownership and control over all utility jobs, without impacting those jobs.