Setting preferences for Visual Explain

Use the Preferences window to set default values for settings that determine how Visual Explain operates and how it displays diagrams.

Procedure

To set preferences for Visual Explain:

  1. Select Window > Preferences.
  2. In the tree view of the Preferences window, select Data Management > Visual Explain.
  3. On the Visual Explain page, set the following options:
    1. Specify whether to launch the Visual Explain wizard when you right-click an SQL statement, view, stored procedure, or user-defined function and select Visual Explain. The wizard allows you to override preferences. If you clear this option, Visual Explain uses the preferences.
    2. If your project is associated with a DB2® data server, specify whether Visual Explain saves in the explain tables the explain data that it collects for the statement.
  4. On the Query Explain Settings page, specify default values for special registers. Changing these values modifies how Visual Explain gathers explain data to use when generating the access plan diagram.
    Attention: Please be aware of the following information regarding DB2 data servers.
    • For DB2 for z/OS®: If you specify different values for CURRENT SCHEMA and CURRENT SQLID, Visual Explain searches for explain tables that are qualified by the value of CURRENT SQLID. If Visual Explain does not find explain tables that are qualified by the value of CURRENT SQLID, Visual Explain attempts to create the explain tables under that value.
    • For DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows: If you change the value of CURRENT SCHEMA to a value that contains special characters, you must delimit the value with single quotation marks.
    • For DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows: Select the Collect column and column group statistics check box if you want Visual Explain to collect detailed statistics about clustered columns and columns that participate in a GROUP BY clause.
  5. On the Viewer page, change various behaviors and colors of diagrams.
  6. On the Nodes page, change the default appearance of nodes. You can change the text, color, and shape of the different types of nodes. You can also choose whether to highlight selected nodes, shadow nodes, or show information about nodes when you move your mouse cursor over them.

Feedback