Q and A

Asked and Answered

I enjoyed your article on DB2 and MQ — read "Do You MQ?" online at http://www.db2mag.com/db_area/ archives/2002/ q3/db2dba.shtml — but I'm new to DB2 and have some questions. Is the queue integrated within DB2 or is it a separate operating system-specific type of queue like a global section held in memory? Also, can you explain what CICS is?

Robert Catterall responds:

CICS (the acronym stands for Customer Information Control System) is an IBM transaction management product. You can get details on the product at http://www.ibm.com/software/ts/cics . TXSeries, a part of the family of products that includes CICS, runs on several server platforms. CICS itself is widely installed on mainframe systems around the world. It's often used as a front-end to DB2 on mainframes (also called IBM zSeries servers).

WebSphere MQ, another IBM product, is designed to provide message queuing and transport services. MQ runs on virtually all the major server/operating system platforms. You can find information on MQ at this http://www.ibm.com/software/ts/mqseries .

MQ and DB2 complement each other very well. Although they are separate subsystems, there's a good bit of integration between the two. For example, if a program running on a server updates a DB2 table and places data on an MQ queue, the two changes can be committed or rolled back (in case the program encounters an error) by the system in a coordinated fashion.

http://www7b.software.ibm.com/dmdd/library/tutorials/0210weinmeister/index.html

See a complete archive of reader/author Q&As .