IDUG EMEA Malta 2018 – Day 4

Another great IDUG conference has inevitably come to its end.

Even though I will miss the networking, the evening parties, chit-chatting with other attendees and all other nice conference side-effects, I am by no means sad that it’s over.

There were a number of very interesting presentations to attend to every day (and still many more missed) and a lot to learn from them. After having spent almost 20 years working as a DB2 DBA, one would think I knew everything about DB2, but each IDUG conference teaches me the same, time and again: there’s always more still to be learnt.

The journey actually never ends as new features are continuously added to DB2.

My takes from this conference include:

• latest DB2 enhancements (tablespace level restore on HADR standby; online index creation on pureScale; faster rollback of v.large transactions – to name a few)
• DB2 Roadmap – see what’s coming in new DB2 releases, online (for example: access files from within SQL statements just like normal tables; reduced logging for v.large inserts; advanced log space management to avoid “log full” conditions)

and other nuggets:

• how to recover a single table from a database backup
• how to check index reorganisation runtimes
• how to solve Sudoku puzzles in seconds, using DB2 recursion (wow ? )
• how to prepare for and execute a DB2 Health Check

I know what I will do first thing when I get back home: I will download the IDUG presentation materials (available online) and read through the presentations I didn’t attend, to find out what I have missed!

On an unrelated note, when I tried to check out of the hotel this morning, I was told by a visibly distressed receptionist that the “hotel system has crashed” and the checkout was currently not available (“it will be done retroactively”, they said). I am sure they don’t use DB2 ?

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