Greetings from Barcelona!
I have been attending and presenting at the IBM TechXchange conference in Barcelona this week. Great city to visit and excellent facilities at the conference centre. I admit to being a little bit anxious ahead of arrival as it is my first technical conference and first technical presentation since coming out of retirement to work for Triton Consulting. I need not to have worried. I was very warmly welcomed by everyone. “JC is back” and feedback on my presentation was very positive. I am delighted to be back!
Over the last 3 days, I have mainly concentrated on the IDUG track which has been very well organized. Unfortunately, there was some initial confusion by the sessions on the IDUG track not being included in the IBM phone app for the conference!
The highlights for me have been the customer presentations about real life experience with the technology. Thomas Bauman from Swiss Mobilar did an excellent presentation on “Realizing Business Value with Db2 SQL Data Insight (SDI)”. He told the story of the main production use case so far, which was related to likely client success for insurance quotations. There significant challenges related to response time performance in transactions. These have been partially addressed through product and more needs to be done. The project has been successfully implemented but there are requirements for further improvements in response time performance, training and dealing with unseen rows. A great talk.
Another great session was from Bjarne Neilson from UBS. This session was about experiences with “Data Gate – Faster, Better, Cheaper”. The talk was mainly about through evaluation of potential use cases: potential for MIPs offload and cost savings for CICS read-only transactions, web serving (single SQL), “replicate once, use many” to multiple replications of the same data. Very informative session as always from Bjarne about his experiences at UBS.
Great networking with clients and sharing experiences. Really looking forward now to IDUG Europe conference in Valencia later this year. Bye for now.