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).
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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.
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IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com
As db2 creates and manages datafiles, containters, tablespace as sparse files. So when we initiate db2 backup command(db2 backup db <DBNAME> online) db2backup preserves the sparseness (holes) of datafiles in backup sets. And when we do db2 restore it aggressively preserves sparseness.
So it means if underlying file system doesn't have sparse feature, then during db2restore operation -> holes in sparse files will get converted into zeros and restore operation will take more time as compared to restoring on filesystem with sparse feature where holes are restored as holes.
Sparse feature was introduced in NFSv4.2. However AIX neither supports NFSv4.1 or NFSv4.2
Sparse is file system property/feature
A sparse file is a file with empty space, or gaps, left open for future addition of data. If the empty spaces are filled with the ASCII null character and the spaces are large enough, the file will be sparse, and disk blocks will not be allocated to it. Empty space is called holes in sparse file. The information about holes is stored in metadata, if file managed by db then database manages the metadata of sparse file.
It does not fill the empty space with zero byte blocks, When a process reads the file, those zero byte blocks get generated dynamically as opposed to being stored on physical storage. it does not store the zeros on disk, instead it holds enough data describing the zeros that will be generated
Do IBM db2 on AIX or LUW creates datafiles, containers as sparse files if underlying filesystem has sparse feature enabled.