FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

No. BCV5 has its own integrated copy facility, which is able to copy DB2 VSAM datasets directly on VSAM. Additionally this program copies several datasets in parallel and also translates the OBIDs.

Hardware based copy services like Flashcopy™ or Snapshot™ are very fast. With these solutions you are able to copy a lot amount of data in a short period. They are copying byte by byte from source to target, but they do not care about the content of the data, which is necessary if you want to copy a DB2™ tablespace. For instance internally a DB2 tablespace contains OBIDs of each table that is part of the tablespace. These OBIDs must be translated from the source to the target. This OBID translation cannot be done by hardware based solutions like Flashcopy™, which makes them not very useful to copy DB2 tablespaces.