Time to market, flexibility, and cost reduction are among the top concerns common to all IT executives. If significant resource investments are placed in mature systems, IT organizations need to balance old and new technology. Older technology, such as non-IBM pre-relational databases, is costly, inflexible, and non-standard. Users store their information on the mainframe and thus preserve the skills and qualities of service their business needs. But users also benefit from standards-based modernization by migrating to IBM® DB2® for z/OS®. With this migration, users deliver new application features quickly and respond to changing business requirements more effectively. When migrating, the main decision is choosing between conversion and re-engineering. Although the rewards associated with rebuilding mature applications are high, so are the risks and customers that are embarking on a migration need that migration done quickly. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we examine how to best approach the migration process by evaluating the environment, assessing the application as a conversion candidate, and identifying suitable tools. This publication is intended for IT decision makers and database administrators who are considering migrating their information to a modern database management system.

IBM® DB2® Version 11.1 for z/OS® (DB2 11 for z/OS or just DB2 11 throughout this book) is the fifteenth release of DB2 for IBM MVSTM. It brings performance and synergy with the IBM System z® hardware and opportunities to drive business value in the following areas. DB2 11 can provide unmatched reliability, availability, and scalability - Improved data sharing performance and efficiency - Less downtime by removing growth limitations - Simplified management, improved autonomics, and reduced planned outages DB2 11 can save money and save time - Aggressive CPU reduction goals - Additional utilities performance and CPU improvements - Save time and resources with new autonomic and application development capabilities DB2 11 provides simpler, faster migration - SQL compatibility, divorce system migration from application migration - Access path stability improvements - Better application performance with SQL and XML enhancements DB2 11 includes enhanced business analytics - Faster, more efficient performance for query workloads - Accelerator enhancements - More efficient inline database scoring enables predictive analytics The DB2 11 environment is available either for new installations of DB2 or for migrations from DB2 10 for z/OS subsystems only. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces the enhancements made available with DB2 11 for z/OS. The contents help database administrators to understand the new functions and performance enhancements, to plan for ways to use the key new capabilities, and to justify the investment in installing or migrating to DB2 11.