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Q. Do you know of any products that use DRDA without a local DB2 in an MVS (OS/390, Z/OS) environment? I'm looking for a way to isolate DB2 into its own LPAR to take advantage of IBM's Workload License Charges (WLC) pricing. By running DB2 in one LPAR and having CICS and batch separated, we can achieve a huge reduction in software costs. So, we're looking for a way to do DDF without a local DB2. DB2 Connect does not run on an MVS platform.

Robert Catterall responds:

It's true that a local DB2 is not always required to utilize DRDA to get to DB2 data from a remote system. In fact, for Linux, Unix, and Windows systems, a local DB2 is never required (not a DB2 instance, that is — "instance" being roughly equivalent to "subsystem" in a mainframe context). For those platforms, all you need on the client side is the DB2 Client code — a relatively thin piece of code that provides DRDA application requester capability.

Mainframes are a different story. If you want a CICS transaction program or a batch program on z/OS system A to be able to access DB2 data on z/OS system B (and these systems can be on physically separate machines or separate LPARs on one machine), you are going to have DB2 for z/OS on system A; otherwise, the SQL statements in the programs on system A cannot be routed to DB2 on system B.

I think I may have heard something about a DRDA application requester capability being made available for a mainframe system on which DB2 is not running, but that was, I believe, related to IBM's Universal Java Client and the associated JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) Type 4 driver. That would apply to Java programs running on a mainframe — not to CICS or batch programs written in a language such as COBOL. In any case, I don't have off the top of my head detailed information about a Type 4 JDBC driver running in a z/OS system.

If you have more than one LPAR and you're looking to trim software costs, it might be worth looking at a parallel sysplex/DB2 data sharing configuration. It's been five years since we went with DB2 data sharing here at CheckFree, and I don't know what's changed, licensing-wise, since then, but I know that IBM at one time offered something called sysplex pricing that lowered software costs for organizations that implemented mainframe sysplexes.

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