Migrating IBM DB2 from 32 to 64-bit platform

The best way to move your database from one server to another is a backup/restore procedure. You can also use db2move utility but it’s not much of help here because it moves only the tables.

If you use a built-in compression to reduce size of your backups which is a normal thing to do then if you’ll try to restore a backup made on a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit platform using a command like this

RESTORE DATABASE mydb FROM “D:\dbbackup” TAKEN AT 20111215030019 TO “D:” WITH 2 BUFFERS BUFFER 1024 PARALLELISM 1 WITHOUT ROLLING FORWARD WITHOUT PROMPTING;

then you will get an error

SQL2570N  An attempt to restore on target OS “NT-64” from a backup created on source OS “NT-32” failed due to the incompatibility of operating systems or an incorrect specification of the restore command.  Reason-code: “2”.

The reason why this happens is a compression library. Each time you make a compressed backup DB2 puts a compression library into a backup itself. When restoring on a 64-bit platform DB2 refuses to use a 32-bit library. There are two solutions to this problem. First is to make a plane uncompressed backup. But if your backup file is quite large then it can be rather painful to move it between servers. Second solution is to add COMRLIB clause into the original query

RESTORE DATABASE mydb FROM “D:\dbbackup” TAKEN AT 20111215030019 TO “D:” WITH 2 BUFFERS BUFFER 1024 PARALLELISM 1 COMPRLIB C:\SQLLIB\BIN\db2compr.dll WITHOUT ROLLING FORWARD WITHOUT PROMPTING;

If you restore to an existing database you will get SQL2539 warning. Which just means that original database files will be deleted.

Use this workaround description at IBM site as a reference: IY71307: SQL2570N when restoring a compressed backup image to another platform or wordsize.

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Tags: 32-bit, 64-bit, architecture, backup, compression, database, DB, DB2, DBMS, IBM, platform, RDBMS, restore