Installing DB2 Express C 9.5 on Mac OS X 10.6

Summary

DB2 Express C 9.5 is now available on OS X. As a result OS X developers do not need to use a virtual machine any longer to be able to run DB2 in their favorite development environment. And what more, the latest version available for download also works on Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Installation Steps

Antonio Cangiano (see below) has created very good step by step instructions, as well as a demo of the install process. Here are a couple of issues one might encounter:

• I recommend setting up a separate DB2 user to own the db2 install, for example db2inst1
• After the install or the first start, DB2 might freeze, and prevent any connections. You might need to kill the db2* processes and start DB2 again.
• Remember to source the environment required to run DB2 command line tools:
. sqllib/db2profile
• Profile can be loaded automatically by adding the above line to .bash_profile in your home directory
• Allow all admin users to access the DB2 instance:
db2 update dbm cfg using sysadm_group Admin
• When trying db2fs, it will crash on Firefox 3, the easiest fix is to download and old version of Firefox, and give the path to that version when prompted by db2fs
• Make sure TCP/IP service in correctly configured in /etc/services and in DB2:
db2 update dbm cfg using SVCENAME db2c_db2inst1
db2set DB2COMM=tcpip
• Add catalog entries for your remote databases:
db2 catalog tcpip node DBNAME remote db2box.domain.com server 5000X

References

• Install DB2 on Mac OS X and give us feedback by Antonio Cangiano
• DB2 Express-C Now Available on Mac OS X by Chris Eaton
• Screencast on how to install DB2 Express-C on Mac OS X by Antonio Cangiano
• DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard by Antonio Cangiano