Gen 8.6 support for Db2 for z/OS temporal tables
Article ID: 424404
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
In the Gen 8.6 Workstation Toolset Technical Design > Technical Defaults > Technical Design Properties for DB2 z/OS the highest version listed is 9.X.
At Db2 for z/OS v10.0 IBM introduced the concept of temporal tables.
A system period temporal table has three required columns. The row-begin column of the system period contains the timestamp value for when a row is created. The row-end column contains the timestamp value for when a row is removed. A transaction-start-ID column contains a unique timestamp value that Db2 assigns per transaction, or the null value.
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In the later Procedure the important part that Gen does not support is the three required columns all being TIMESTAMP(12) with picosecond precision, with Gen supporting only TIMESTAMP which equates to TIMESTAMP(6) with microsecond precision.
Even if the Technical Design > Data Structure List does not support generation of the relevant DDL for temporal tables, it is possible for Gen applications to manipulate such tables once implemented by DDL created outside Gen?
What experience and recommendations can Broadcom offer with the use of Db2 z/OS temporal tables in Gen applications?
Environment
Gen 8.6 Db2 for z/OS applications.
Resolution
Gen L2 Engineering have advised as follows:
Gen does not currently support DB2 z/OS temporal tables. It would require Gen to be able to handle table columns with a different format for timestamps.
As Gen does not support temporal tables, it is expected that Gen applications cannot handle the new type of TIMESTAMP columns.
To add this support would require an enhancement (an idea can be created on the Ideas Community)
If only external action blocks (or inline code) were used to access the temporal tables/columns and the new temporal columns (timestamps) were not passed as Gen views, it might be possible to access them but L2 has not tried this or verified it due to the lack of the current support. They also do not know what kind of side effects the extra columns could have or if that would cause other problems.
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