At XTIVIA, we monitor and support multiple clients that use Lawson applications with a DB2 LUW (Linux, Unix and Windows) database back end. I wanted to share some of my experience and lessons learned over the years.
Schema Layout:
Out of the box, Lawson uses four main schemas: Lawson, Logan, Gen and TF (Tax Factory). Depending on the implementaion, our clients may have all 4 schema in the same database or they may have the Lawson schema tables in their own database and the Gen, Logan, and TF schema tables in another database. We have also seen each of them in a seperate database. So we see anywhere from 1 database to 4 seperate databases for any given implementation. This is usually left up to the Lawson Consultant that is setting up the application. The important thing for the DBA is to insist on separtate tablespaces for each schema tables and indexes. That means lawson_data, lawson_index, logan_data, logan_index, gen_data, gen_index, and tf_data, tf_index tablespaces. The Lawson schema tables have much more activity and data changes then the others, so it’s important to assign seperate bufferpools for the lawson tables and indexes and also seperate disks for these tablespaces. One more reminder is to enable tablespace Auto-Resize if at all possible.
Filesystem Layout:
A filesystem layout that includes seperate mount points for the Lawson tablespaces, the Logan, Gen, and TF tablespaces, database backups, archive logs, and active db2 logs is what we normally recommend. Archiving logs to a seperate filesystem is always important for ease of management and pruning. The tablespaces for Lawson data and indexes will grow quickly. Make sure you have plenty of disk space and room for growth there.
Table Maintenance:
Nightly runstats on the Lawson tables is very important. We like to set up nightly runstats and weekly online reorgs. This maintenance is important for all databases. There are a few Lawson tables that are quite large and we recommend reorging them seperately, as needed, because it can take a long time for the process to complete. That’s why we sometimes exclude the PRDISTRIB, AMTRANS, GLTRANS, APDISTRIB tables from the Reorg script and then manually reorg them as needed.
This was just a few of the Lessons we’ve learned after supporting Lawson customers for many years. If you have any questions about using DB2 with Lawson, be sure and contact me through this blog or request support through our www.virtual-dba.com website.