Q and A

Asked and Answered

What are your recommendations for setting policies governing ad hoc reporting using QMF, Crystal Reports, and so on? I'm developing guidelines covering appropriate use and resource limits.

Robert Catterall responds:

I do have a few recommendations.

• Severely limit query authority on tables in the production database.
• If possible, have an operational data store (ODS) database or a data warehouse for ad-hoc query activity.
• For people who do need ad-hoc query access to the production database, use the DB2 for OS/390 Resource Limit Facility (RLF) to limit the CPU time that can be consumed by a dynamic SQL statement.
• Try to get really long-running statements executed offline via something like QMF batch.

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