Skip to Main Content
IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data & AI organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:


Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,


Post your ideas

Post ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,

  1. Post an idea

  2. Upvote ideas that matter most to you

  3. Get feedback from the IBM team to refine your idea


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com


Status Not under consideration
Workspace Db2
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 1, 2020

Allow to exclude index pages from backup - recreate after restore

Db2 backup is saving all database objects regardless if the objects (especially indexes) could be re-created, because the objects contain just redundant data.

Db2 already provides the DBM CFG parameter INDEXREC which configures when an invalid index will be re-created.

If Db2 would provide an option to backup indexes as invalid, the backup image would contain just the meta-information of the index and its state invalid. Thus, nearly no index pages will be sent to the storage manager, no backup space will be required.

After a restore of such a backup the indexes are in state invalid and depending on INDEXREC the indexes will be recreated.

Considering an environment where production backups can not be used for non-backup environments (development, test). Often the indexes contain about 30% of the total disk space. If a backup image is about 6 TiB in size and daily backups are taken, the space required at the storage manager would sum up to 60 TiB per month.

And since a restore will only be in case of a serious outage, this index-space of the backup image will never be used.

Feature would allow to save backup storage space, increase backup (and restore) speed.

The disadvantage will be the necessity of rebuilding the indexes following a restore and rollforward (depending on INDEXREC).

Needed by Date Dec 31, 2020