A Note About IBM's DB2 .NET Data Provider

A lot of people like to use DB2 (on whatever platform -- mainframe, Linux/UNIX/Windows, IBM i) as a data server for .NET applications running on Windows servers. IBM facilitates this architecture with the DB2 .NET Data Provider, which extends DB2 support for the ADO.NET interface. The DB2 .NET Data Provider is included with several of IBM's data server client and driver offerings (more on this momentarily). A DB2 for z/OS DBA friend of mine recently asked, "How can I tell if the DB2 .NET Data Provider is 'there' on an application server?" As it turns out, there's an app for that, and I'll tell you about it in this post (many thanks to Brent Gross, a senior member of IBM's DB2 development organization, who told ME about this).

The app to which I refer is called testconn. It's a .NET application that ships with all IBM client packages. testconn will actually drive a DB2 connection though the .NET layer. There are versions of testconn for each .NET Framework: 1.1, 2.0, and 4.0. To run testconn for a database (e.g., the sample database) that is local to the app server, you'd type the following (if you were looking to verify that the IBM DB2 Data Provider for .NET Framework 2.0 is installed on the server):

testconn20 database=sample

What you specify after testconn20 (or testconn40 or whatever) is a .NET connection string. The testconn tool will use that string to connect to the target database. If all you want to do is check to see if the driver is there, you can use any name for the database. If it's not a valid database name, testconn will report an error indicating that it cannot connect to the database, but it will first print out all of the driver information. Here is an example of a testconn execution for a remote database:

testconn20 database=robdb;server=myserver.com:50000;userid=robert;password=freddy

Here is some sample output from an execution of testconn:

E:\>testconn20 database=sample

Step 1: Printing version info
        .NET Framework version: 2.0.50727.3615
        DB2 .NET provider version: 9.0.0.2
        DB2 .NET file version: 9.7.3.2
        Capability bits: ALLDEFINED
        Build: 20100823
        Factory for invariant name IBM.Data.DB2 verified
        Factory for invariant name IBM.Data.Informix verified
        IDS.NET from DbFactory is Common IDS.NET
        VSAI assembly version: 9.1.0.0
        VSAI file version: 9.7.0.489
        Elapsed: 0.5

Step 2: Validating db2dsdriver.cfg against db2dsdriver.xsd schema file
        Elapsed: 0.015625

Step 3: Connecting using "database=sample"
        Server type and version: DB2/NT 09.07.0003
        Elapsed: 1.890625

Step 4: Selecting rows from SYSIBM.SYSTABLES to validate existance of packages
   SELECT * FROM SYSIBM.SYSTABLES FETCH FIRST 5 rows only
        Elapsed: 0.21875

Step 5: Calling GetSchema for tables to validate existance of schema functions
        Elapsed: 0.40625


Test passed.

And there you have it. So, if in doubt: testconn.

Now, I mentioned that the DB2 .NET Data Provider is included with a number of IBM's data server clients and drivers. You can get more information about these offerings at this url:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.swg.im.dbclient.install.doc/doc/c0023452.html

I'll tell you that the preferred client package for you is likely to be the IBM Data Server Driver Package (also known as the ds driver). It's lightweight and easy to distribute.

Got DB2? Got .NET apps? They go great together. Check it out, if you haven't already.