High availability in a DB2 environment primarily aims to reduce downtime. This means ensuring that the system is accessible and operational even in the event of hardware failures, software failures, or other disruptions. By minimizing downtime, businesses can maintain continuity of operations and avoid costly interruptions to their services. 

The FOREIGN KEY constraint in DB2 enforces referential integrity, ensuring that values in a column (or columns) of one table match values in another table's primary key or unique key. This maintains consistency and relationships between related tables. 

Common methods used to maintain data integrity in a DB2 database include constraints, triggers, and referential integrity. Constraints ensure that data meets certain criteria or rules before being inserted or updated in a table. Triggers are actions that are automatically performed in response to certain events, such as inserting, updating, or deleting data from a table. Referential integrity ensures that relationships between tables are enforced, preventing orphan records and maintaining consistency. These methods help to ensure that the data remains accurate, consistent, and reliable. 

In denormalization, one action taken to reduce the number of joins in SQL queries is to combine multiple tables into one. By consolidating related data from different tables into a single denormalized table, the need for joining tables in SQL queries is minimized. This approach simplifies query formulation and execution, leading to improved performance, especially for read-heavy workloads. However, it's essential to carefully design the denormalized schema to avoid excessive redundancy and maintain data consistency. 

Validation mechanisms in DB2, such as check constraints and unique constraints, help detect and prevent data integrity violations during data modification operations. 

When deciding which columns to include in an index in DB2, several factors must be considered. These include selectivity (the uniqueness of values), cardinality (the number of distinct values), and query patterns (frequently used queries). By understanding these factors, you can design indexes that optimize query performance by efficiently retrieving data based on the specific needs of the application. 

The IMPORT utility in DB2 is used when you need to extract data from an external file and load it into DB2 tables. It provides a convenient way to import data into the database from various external sources, such as flat files or other database systems. This utility helps streamline the data loading process, ensuring data consistency and integrity. 

DB2 handles password management for user accounts by enforcing password complexity rules. It allows database administrators to set policies specifying minimum password length, character requirements (such as requiring a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters), and expiration intervals. These measures enhance security by making it harder for unauthorized users to guess or crack passwords, thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized access to the database. Password management is an essential aspect of database security, and DB2 provides features to ensure robust password protection. 

Stored procedures in DB2 can execute multiple SQL statements sequentially, allowing for more complex operations compared to regular SQL statements. 

Performance tuning in DB2 primarily focuses on optimizing the utilization of system resources such as CPU, memory, and disk I/O to improve overall performance. 

Yes, a cursor in DB2 can be used to traverse a result set in reverse order by using the FETCH PRIOR clause. This clause allows the cursor to move backward through the result set, fetching the previous row relative to the current position. By specifying FETCH PRIOR, developers can implement functionalities such as scrolling through data in reverse chronological order or navigating through the result set in a custom manner. This capability enhances the flexibility and usability of DB2 cursors in various application scenarios. 

DB2 manages deadlock situations primarily by using locks. Locking ensures that only one transaction can access a resource at a time, thereby preventing conflicting updates that could lead to deadlocks. Transactions, rollbacks, and timestamps are related concepts but are not the primary mechanism for managing deadlocks in DB2.