IDUG EMEA 2024

Over the past four decades, Db2 for z/OS has gained a reputation for rock solid stability and groundbreaking innovation. As a result it has come to underpin much of the world’s economy and is depended upon by many of the largest corporations, enterprises and government agencies across the world. This session will review development strategy and vision in an evolving world. We will assess where we are today with Db2 13 and look forward to maintain Db2 for z/OS as the system of record for the next forty years.

Db2 for z/OS continues to improve the performance monitoring in various ways based on our customers’ needs. This session discusses the latest performance monitoring information on Db2 for z/OS that have been updated through Db2 13 and continuous deliveries.  It includes  the recommended set of data collections on the various situations,  updates on key performance metrics to monitor as well as performance diagnostic updates. 

Db2 13 for z/OS GA and CD offer many features useful for both application developers and database administrators. Some of the new functionalities include concurrency handling between application threads, controlling resource utilization duration to optimize for successful database object’s online schema change, and reducing the possibility of transaction failure after an online schema change. They are all useful enhancements which have been adopted by several Db2 users. Come and learn details of these features and why they are important to UBS during both the sponsor user process and after migration.

SQL Functions have long enabled customers to improve productivity and performance while also enabling cross platform porting, and encapsulating application logic in the database. Db2 for z/OS supports Built-in Functions that Aggregate data, operate on scalar data, as well as materialize data as a table. Db2 also enables customers to create functions in Host languages (such as COBOL or C/C++) or in SQL PL (The ANSI compatible SQL Procedures Language).
In the latest version of Db2, SQL Data Insights was introduced to allow easy, function based AI, to be applied directly to customer data.
This session will cover the basics and dig deeper into how to exploit all the Function(al) capabilities of Db2 to take your SQL queries to new levels.

Join me on a journey through our first year of deploying SQL Data Insights (SDI) into production. Discover how SDI impacted our business processes, changed stakeholder perceptions of the mainframe, and enhanced our approach to data analysis.
We will start with a review of our first use case and discuss the resources consumed for training and scoring, as well as the impact SDI had on our business processes. 
SDI's most evident benefit is its ability to analyze data where it sits without having to export, transfer and reload it, and with minimal data science dependency. But how does it compare to more traditional approaches? To answer that, we'll compare SDI with other machine learning algorithms by applying them to a frequently used dataset for predicting diamond prices. We'll delve into the accuracy of the algorithms and see how SDI stacks up against data scientists' most loved algorithms.
Following that, we'll explore a brand-new use case that applies the new commonality-function in Db2 FL504. We'll discuss its usefulness, resource requirements, and potential impact on business processes, providing more practical insights into the power of SDI.
And finally, I'll share a use case that demonstrates how to identify outliers using SDI with Db2 monitoring data, ready to be applied in your own shop. 
Don't miss this opportunity to gain practical insights into the power of SDI and how it can transform your data analysis!

This presentation will provide the ongoing success story Db2 z/OS Version 13 and covers the latest experiences with Db2 13 at Commerzbank AG. It will talk about some key important areas which are essential for the success and how to prevent some known avoidable pitfalls. We share the important latest experiences of the last 12 months, explains the upcoming and validated best practices in several key areas. This session will also dive into Function Level details and dependencies up to the latest FL 504 (/505), maintenance aspects, some tooling dependencies and some performance aspects as well as base utilities and system functionalities.

This session introduces the Lakehouse concept and what sets it apart from data lakes and traditional data warehouses. We focus on mainframe operational data stores as data feeds, and how such feeds can be integrated with other, non-mainframe data sources, how Lakehouses re-invent analytics and how machine learning training pipelines can be fed using data extracted and refined on a Lakehouse. 
We will use watsonx.data as the Lakehouse implementation, but the approach translates to any Lakehouse because of the use of open data formats.

Encrypting connections to Db2 servers with TLS is increasingly becoming the standard. While TLS with server certificates is the most common case, Db2 for z/OS installations are more frequently asking for client certificate authentication. After a quick recap of the TLS basics, this presentation shows how client certificate authentication works and how it can be configured for Db2 and REST clients connecting to a Db2 for z/OS database server.

Natwest group is one of the largest Db2 for z/OS customers worldwide with multi member multi data sharing groups. This environment supports a number of critical, very high volume and high availability (24/7/365) customer facing application.
In the highly regulated financial services world there is an increasing requirement to encrypt application data at rest held in Db2 objects. This session gives an overview of encryption at Rest for z/OS Db2 and the implementation details from a Db2 perspective.

Analyzing Db2 for z/OS performance problems can be overwelming. There is a lot of information available in Db2 , z/OS, ... so it is important that you know where to look and what to look at.
This session will discuss a number of real customer problems, what info to collect, and how to analyze and interpret the data to find the heart of the problem.
While the focus will be on Db2, but as Db2 performance is closely related to how the overall z/OS system is doing, the session will also explore a number of z/OS key metrics to see whether the issue you experience in Db2 might be part of a larger system problem or not. 

The session will concentrate on new SWAT team experiences. Various unexpected outcomes and behaviors will be discussed as well has hot technical items customers are exploiting as well as technologies that have been challenging for customers. The complete session will be focused on customer experiences and sharing real life outcomes.

Do you want to know when unauthorized access to Db2 has been attempted? Maybe learn who messed up your data? In this presentation we will learn what Db2 for z/OS has to offer for security auditing. The audience will get a good understanding of audit practices; traces and policies that can help to prevent unauthorized access.

SysplexWLB is one of features allowing achieve continues availability in datasharing group accessed from remote DDF clients. However to effectively use it there are some requirements to meet, often not understood correctly. Also new Db2 z/OS 13 gives sysprogs and Db2 administrators more "power" to enable it globally for clients coming to Db2z.This presentation will explain concept of sysplexWLB

how it works
what is required to implement it,
sample ideal architectual setup
zparm settings
recent enhancements in Db2 z/OS 13 for sysplexWLB

The presentation will concentrate on the use and evolution of Db2 DDF access from its infancy to a leading OLTP transactional model that organizations are relying on. During the session industry infrastructure and application usage best practices will be discussed. Db2 for z/OS SWAT team customer experiences will be shared, what has worked and the challenges that have been experienced. In addition to DDF access dynamic SQL fears and concerns will be targeted. The overall objective of the session is to share best practices and success stories and to calm any revelations around DDF from an infrastructure and application perspective and organizations increasingly exploit the technology.

This joint presentation by Michal Bialecki and Adam Pesta, "Unleashing the power of Db2 z/OS profile tables" explores the pivotal role of system table profiles (SYSIBM.DSN_PROFILE_*)  in Db2 z/OS database management. Attendees will discover how strategic profile utilization:

enhances availabilility,
fortifies and enforces security for remote clients
allows granular application-level lock control or RELEASE(COMMIT/DEALLOCATE) behavior for both remote and local applications 

The session covers crafting effective profiles, real-world examples, and addresses challenges in profile management. Insightful discussions on future trends empower attendees to leverage Db2 z/OS profiles for transformative outcomes in their database systems.

RESTful API (Application Programming Interface) support has been introduced to strengthen the position Db2 for z/OS plays in the new mobile application era. This presentation will equip the audience with a solid understanding of REST APIs in general and how to apply them to Db2. Administrators will learn how to create and maintain the services while developers will get familiar with the Db2 specifics.

Db2 for z/OS is undergoing a seismic shift in its tooling portfolio at the moment, with the sunsetting of Data Studio and DSM, and the emergency of a VS Code plugin stack for desktop developers and a web based suite built around the Admin Foundation offering.  This talk will focus on the VS Code side that leverages The Open Mainframe Project Zowe Explorer and Db2 Developer for z/OS extension to provide a powerful and intuitive way to work with z/OS address spaces, jobs, stored procedures, ad-hoc SQL scripts, and more.   Zowe is fast becoming the new face of z/OS for folks doing mainframe education courses and this talk will cover the Zowe CLI as well as the Db2 CLP showing the differences and overlap and when to choose each one,  as well as the use of Zowe to build out DevOps pipelines to help simplify and automate software agility.

Duration: ½ Day, Classroom Style, No Computers needed.
In this workshop you will get a technical deep dive on latest enhancements in Db2 Analytics Accelerator directly from the Accelerator development organization. We will cover topics such as: 
-         What's new in latest releases including technical details and usage.
-         Deployment and architecture options, migration, and HA/DR best practices.
-         Data load and Integrated Synchronization experiences. 
-         Accelerator on Z monitoring tips. 
-         Query performance best practices