IDUG on Wednesday was somewhat overshadowed by the dreadful events of Tuesday, with the full impact emerging over Tuesday night and Wednesday during the course of the day. Our thoughts are with the people of the region around Valencia as they struggle to come to terms with the loss of life and all the damage caused.
Somehow, the conference continued although people were getting alerts about cancelled flights and other travel restrictions. It was good to see so many old friends there, including Mark Turner and Dhiren Chaudhary from NatWest, along with Karen Wilkins from IBM UK and Gulfem Ogutgen from IBM Turkey.
On Tuesday, our own John Campbell had presented a very well-attended double session on War Stories, Greatest Hits and Best Practices. He gave out some extremely positive messages about the advantages of exploiting Fast Traversal Blocks with the integrity problems now seemingly far behind us, as well as some of the exciting new features in Db2 13 for z/OS.
Later on that day our friend Ute Kleyensteuber from Commerzbank AG whose presentation on Db2 13 and new functions included details on the features they were most interested in. Our overseas colleagues, in Germany in particular, are a long way ahead of us in the UK in adopting new versions of Db2 for z/OS and in advancing function levels. Some selected highlights of the functions Commerzbank liked include:
- Performance enhancements
- Discovery and granular control of TLS connectivity
- Online delete log, also discussed by John Campbell in his presentation
- Online conversion from UTS PBG to PBR
- Utility history
Wednesday included a valuable session on What’s New with BMC Db2 AMI utilities by Michael Cotignola of BMC, especially valuable given Triton’s interest in recovery and data integrity. That was followed by a double act by IBM Db2 DE Akiko Hoshikawa and our old friend Bart Steegmans on diagnosing performance problems. The organisers obviously underestimated the interest in this deep dive, so that it was standing room only in a very hot room. Well worth it, though, with Bart and Akiko entertaining and informing us with their lively to and fro, including reminders to expect the unexpected.
I thought that session was outstanding, but it a real highlight came next with Christoph Theisen of Rocket Software on Db2 Connect and Best Practices. His presentation style was warm and engaging, and the material so well put together it contained all the information you needed to know. It was the clearest exposition of Db2 Connect, including all the client packages, I’ve ever seen.
And then we met Bart again with another friend, Michal Bialecki, unravelling the mysteries of Sysplex Workload Balancing, one of the most enduring challenges for many customers around the world. When I say ‘unravelling the mysteries’, quite a few mysteries remain, including how WLM calculates member weightings. It’s clear that ‘sloshing’ will be with us for some time.