More efficient reporting in OMEGAMON DB2 PM/PE

This was an interesting issue that I helped a customer with recently in the area of OMEGAMON DB2 reporting.

The customer wanted to create a DB2 Accounting summary report, but just for a select plan, in this case DSNTEP2. Out of several million accounting records in SMF, there were, on a typical day, a few hundred relevant accounting records. When the customer ran the report, the batch job would run for almost 2 hours, and use a fair amount of CPU considering the amount of report data being generated. Even though the job was reading through several million accounting records to create the report, this seemed like an excessively long run time.

I reviewed the OMEGAMON DB2 reporter documentation (SC19-2510), and noted an entry that referred to the fact using the GLOBAL option would help reporter performance. The doc says: "Specify the filters in GLOBAL whenever you can, because only the data that passes through the GLOBAL filters is processed further. The less data OMEGAMON XE for DB2 PE needs to process, the better the performance."

So for example if all you want is a specific plan/authid try the following:

GLOBAL
INCLUDE (AUTHID (USERID01))
INCLUDE (PLANNAME (DSNTEP2)) .....

The net result for this user was that the run time for the same report dropped to just a few minutes, and CPU usage of the batch job dropped dramatically, as well. Take advantage of this option, when you can.