I always enjoy a chat with the locals when we have an IDUG event so I spent the 30 minute taxi journey from the airport to the hotel in conversation with my driver. I think I actually understood about 3 words. It was only today when watching the local news that I realized the expression “Durhurlin” he continually referred to was “The Hurling”: an enormously popular local sport that looks like a combination of Lacrosse and medieval warfare.
Luckily our presenters here are at IDUG are more easily understood. With my own presentation out of the way on Monday afternoon, I’ve been able to relax a bit and concentrate on absorbing the information from other sessions. And there have been some fine presentations. Daniel Luksetich was entertaining and informative this morning and I’ve come away from that with a whole bunch of Advanced SQL Features to play with when I get home. Or maybe I’ll take his advice and curl up with the SQL Reference Manual and a Scotch….
Matt Huras did 2 sessions this afternoon; one on Minimizing Outages and one on BLU Best Practices. There was a huge amount of information and a few ‘Eureka’ moments, particularly in the section on accomplishing rolling upgrades. I found myself mentally composing the email I’m going to send later on to one of our clients saying ‘about that software upgrade concern you have: have I got some good news for you…’.
I was chatting to Mika Lindholm at our Triton bash (or should that be hooley??) last night: he hails from Finland and tells me that the population is only about 5 million. So how come they have such a wealth of DB2 talent? Anyhow, he had some customer experiences to share on the use of BLU and how, sometimes, you’re still going to find row-based tables your best bet. One interesting aside from the audience; in his examples Mika had a large table (8 billion rows) and a ‘moderately’ sized table of 300 odd million rows. There’s probably quite a few of us who are old enough to remember when 300 million rows wasn’t moderate at all; more like huge. It makes you wonder what sort of data volumes we’re going to be dealing with in 10 years from now.
So we have a couple more days of IDUG to go and much more expert opinion to absorb. Thanks to all involved for the hard work in putting this together and to the people of “Dublin’s Fair City, Where the girls are so pretty”. It’s been a great Craic. See you all out in Brussels next year.