IDUG EMEA 2015 Day 4

Dublin hosted IDUG EMEA for the first time and what a warm welcome we received. Plenty of great company, great food and of course great Guinness.

Day 4 is always tinged with sadness as it is the end of IDUG EMEA for another 12 months. Although not for the busy IDUG volunteers who are already in full planning mode for next year’s event in Brussels. Without the IDUG volunteers there would be no conference, so many thanks to all of them.

It was an early start on Day 4, particularly following the very enjoyable IBM awards party Wednesday evening at the Guinness Storehouse. There were some well deserved winners of awards, regional user groups and individuals, who contribute to the DB2 community throughout the year. And also recognition for Triton Associate Colin Raybould who passed 4 certifications in 3 days. As a souvenir of the IBM event we all received an engraved Guinness pint glass which, given the volumes of ‘The Black Stuff‘ I have consumed over the last few days, is likely to be used for nothing stronger than water. For a while at least.

Back to the early start on Day 4 and a very topical presentation from IBM’s Gareth Jones on performance monitoring of Dynamic SQL. Being a typical DBA control freak, dynamic SQL makes me a little nervous. With static SQL I can view access paths and report on package performance to provide trend analysis and enable early indication of potential problem SQL. Dynamic SQL is a little more problematic. However Gareth’s presentation offered ideas  and processes to explain dynamic SQL and capture performance data. I will certainly be improving dynamic SQL performance monitoring for our customers where applicable.

The final presentation in Dublin was a very interesting closing keynote by Jonathan Adams describing the challenges that the ever growing Digital workload will present. Jonathan was very engaging and an excellent presenter providing valuable insight into what we should be worrying about in the coming years as Digital data demands increase.

It may have been the first time Dublin welcomed us IDUGers, but judging by the Craic that everyone had, I suspect it won’t be the last. Sláinte to all and see you in Brussels, which I’m sure will be just as successful with our very own Iqbal Goralwalla as the IDUG Europe CPC chair.