What are the best companies for DB2 DBA on Mainframes?

Overall, just don’t look for the RDBMS product or vendor on which you have worked for few years, if you have the concepts clear then you can work for any of the available products in RDBMS and NoSQL areas with some basic training and they are all equally exciting like DB2 or more exciting than DB2 as for most of them the amount of resources available to learn are really incredible.

DB2 LUW DBA jobs will be there at least for the next few years but you will have very limited choice when it comes to job location, preferred roles etc. While saying that if you are enjoying being a DBA on DB2, you will surely enjoy working as a DBA or Designer in similar RDBMS / NoSQL Database products which are built almost on the same framework of DB2. I will recommend you to look for products like IBM PureData ( MPP Appliance) , IBM DashDB ( DWH on Cloud) , PostgreSQL and either one of ( MongoDB / Cassandra / DynamoDB ) — NoSql Document Databases and start exploring them more. MongoDB , DynamoDB, Postgresql are available for free download and you can access them on the Cloud or sandboxes are available for free download and practice. You can build your own case-studies and practice on them on Cloud ( Queries, DB Set-up, Load/Ingest, Partitioning, Backup/Restore, Indexing , System Tables etc ) . Increase your horizon to those Databases, only the commands are different but apart from that conceptually they are almost identical to DB2. For your next assignment, don’t just stick yourself to DB2 but open your search range and add NoSQL and MPP Appliance databases to your profile. There is still huge gap in demand / supply ratio in these new age database technologies and thus having good concepts on few of them with command on their architecture will give you better edge than other DBAs inside your organization. Learning Postgresql will help you to very easily pickup Netezza / PureData , Teradata and Greenplum MPP systems. As you already know DB2, you can also pickup DashDB quite quickly.

Overall, just don’t look for the RDBMS product or vendor on which you have worked for few years, if you have the concepts clear then you can work for any of the available products in RDBMS and NoSQL areas with some basic training and they are all equally exciting like DB2 or more exciting than DB2 as for most of them the amount of resources available to learn are really incredible. Good luck !!