We are a dev company that develops and supports an application based on DB2 LUW 10.5 for a customer. We have a VPN that gives us access to our customer's production environment, and we often connect to the production DB2 server directly to investigate various issues. We want to avoid accessing the production database in this way, so we'd like to create a copy of the production database on our network.
The production server is currently replicated to a DR site using HADR. HADR with the read only option would give us what we wanted but we want to avoid the need to purchase another license for our server - we'd like to just use the Express-C edition of DB2. Log shipping may be possible but from what I read the database is not accessible while in the state to accept logs.
For the solution to work the target database would need to be fairly up to date. It can be read-only but that is not a requirement. If it is not read-only we would not want to push changes back to the master.
What options are available for this scenario? Thanks in advance for any ideas.