Installing DB2 on Mac OS X

It’s useful to have a local installation of the DB2 on Mac for development and test purposes. I have a local installation on my Macbook to develop DB2-backed Ruby on Rails applications.

IBM DB2 is a mature relational database server. It supports lots of neat things like SQL, XQuery for XML, SPARQL for RDF, full text search, and so on.

DB2 on Mac using Docker

A quicker option for getting running with DB2 on Mac is to use the DB2 docker image. It should get you started quickly with DB2 by running it in a virtualized Linux environment on your Mac.

DB2 on Mac natively

Here are the current instructions for installing DB2 10.1 on Mac OS X, courtesy of my colleague Kevin Rose:

Instructions to install DB2 v10.1 on Mac OS X Yosemite:

Prerequisite: XCode developer tools must be installed. These can be installed from the Mac App Store.

1. Ensure the following entries are in the /etc/sysctl.conf. Create the file /etc/sysctl.conf if it does not exist.

kern.sysv.shmmax=1073741824
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=4096
kern.sysv.shmseg=32
kern.sysv.shmall=1179648
kern.maxfilesperproc=65536
kern.maxfiles=65536

Restart your Mac after creating the file to make the values take effect.

2. Open a terminal with a shell for the the user that will become instance owner.

3. Ensure that otool is in the path. Execute otool:

     otool

If the error is “command not found” then run the following

     export PATH=$PATH*:*/Applications/XCode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin

4. Extract the DB2 install image from the tar archive:

     tar -xzvf db2_v101_macos_expc.tar.gz

The image will be extracted into an expc directory.

5. Enter the expc directory and run the installer and perform a non-root install:

     cd expc
     db2_install
  # *** DO NOT RUN db2_install AS ROOT ***

This will install DB2 to the following default location: /Users/$(whoami)/sqllib

Execute step 6 if you need to enable connections for a userid other than the instance owner:

6. Enable OS authentication. (You need to be an Admin user to run these commands):

cd /Users/$(whoami)/sqllib/security
sudo chown root /Users/$(whoami)/sqllib/security/db2ckpw
sudo chmod u+rxs /Users/$(whoami)/sqllib/security/db2ckpw 
sudo chmod o+rx  /Users/$(whoami)/sqllib/security/db2ckpw

The instructions for starting DB2 and configuring remote access are the same as before.