DB2 Universal Database for z/OS and OS/390 database connections

Use the New Database Connection wizard or the Database Connection page to create a JDBC connection to DB2 Universal Database for z/OS or DB2 Universal Database for z/OS and OS/390.

The following JDBC drivers are supported for DB2 Universal Database for z/OS or DB2 Universal Database for z/OS and OS/390. The available drivers vary depending on the version that you are connecting to.

The DB2 Application Driver is included with the DB2 Runtime Application Client and the DB2 Application Development Client. The DB2 Application Driver is a Type 2 JDBC driver. You can use this JDBC driver only to connect to databases that are cataloged on your local computer. The DB2 Application Driver uses native DB2 CLI libraries to retrieve metadata.

Restriction: Use the Application Driver that is included with your DB2 UDB for z/OS client to connect to a DB2 UDB for z/OS database. Other versions of the Application Driver that are incompatible with your client version can cause the workbench to shut down abnormally.

The DB2 Universal Driver is included with the DB2 Application Development Client. This driver is a two tier pure Java JDBC driver that allows a Java client to communicate directly with DB2 UDB servers through the DRDA protocol. This driver supports both Type 2 connections (to databases that are cataloged on your local computer) and Type 4 connections (using a host, database name, and port). This driver is designed to replace the Type 3 Net driver.

Note that due to a JDBC limitation, when connecting to DB2 Universal Database for OS/390 (CP930), some double-byte character set (DBCS) data gets truncated based on the data length of UTF-8 encoding. 10 single-byte character set (SBCS) Katakana characters can be received as three Katakana characters by a "SELECT" statement. The actual data stored in a table in OS/390 is '8182838485868788898A' in hexadecimal which is 10 Japanese Katakana characters (1 byte for 1 character). However, when using the JDBC driver with the default setting, the received query data shows only three characters ('efbdb1efbdb2efbdb3') as the valid nine bytes string in UTF-8, which would be cut off from 'efbdb1efbdb2efbdb3efbdb4efbdb5efbdb6efbdb7efbdb8efbdb9efbdba' in the JDBC driver.