Prior to DB2 9.5 there were three issues with DPF backups. The first is that you had to be on each database partition to do the backup (or use db2_all syntax) and the issue was complicated by the fact that the catalog partition had to be backed up by itself and then all other partitions could be backed up simultaneously. The second issue was that the INCLUDE LOGS was not supported in a DPF backup and the third issue was that each partition was backed up independently and therefore had a different backup timestamp, making the recovery more complicated.

All three of these issues have been addressed in DB2 9.5. The first is that the BACKUP command can now take the partitions you want to backup as part of the command. So for example you can say

db2 backup database foo on dbpartitionnums (1 to 5) to TSM
or
db2 backup database foo on all dbpartitionnums to /fs1/backups

DB2 will automatically do the backups on the partitions specified (and it takes care of the catalog partition without you having to back it up separately). If you only want to backup 2 partitions at a time, you simply put the partition numbers you want in the dbpartitionnums clause.

The second issue mentioned above is also resolved in that the INCLUDE LOGS option is now fully supported in a DPF environment and will include the log files necessary to restore the online backup.

Finally when you run this form of backup command the timestamp for the backups on all partitions is the same and the command will return a single timestamp for use during the restore of any or all of these database partitions.

If you are a DPF user, these backup simplifications will hopefully make life just a little bit easier on you.

Author: Chris Eaton (Product Manager, IBM)
Source:ITtoolbox blogs