As a first time attendee and a goody two shoes I went to the orientation session after my breakfast which was nice again, although the bettered Cauliflower was a little strange though. The first session that I went to was:

Pro Active DBA – Michael Tiefenbacher

This was good and very informative and cant wait to take the bull by the horns when I get back and be pro active and set my own KPI’s that I can monitor and get hold off as opposed to something that I cant monitor easily set by my managers. I found this session easy to take notes in as the pace and content was good and was a lot like being back at university with the learning pace. I learnt from this session:

1. That although I do not have licences for Workload Manager (WLM) I can still use some of the monitors for free after I have activated them and the database
2. There is a LAG function in DB2 that takes two timestamps.
3. There is an automated scheduler that “replaces” the task centre that has been depreciated, but it will only run one sotred procedure at a time

The second session I went too was:

Eliminating Performance Bottlenecks in DB2 9.7 and PureScale – Steve Rees

This session was presented at a pace quite a lot faster than the last, with code samples that were quite large so I am sure that they will be useful. It concentrated on “time spent” metrics, and the use of MON_* table functions to iterate through a bottle necks. From this I learnt:

1. There are three levels of monitors: System, Data Object and Activity —> SQL statements.
2. db2 +c disables auto commit
3. Some of the MON_* stuff contains XML that can be interrogated to get even more information to a greater level of detail

There were then the “Vendor Solution Presentations” these were not well advertised to what they were actually about unless you were in the know or it was obvious from the title. I took the decision to not go to one of these and do an exam instead. Good plan in practice, but unfortunately when speaking to the IBM rep on the exam desk it seems the system was “broken”!! I did get a free book out of it though on Big Data and IBM offerings in this area so should be good for a read.

The final session that I went to  was:

Sneak peek at the future of DB2 application development – Leon Katsnelson 

This was an amazing and eye opening session and I defiantly do not want to be part of a company that sticks it head in the sand about the changes that are going on in the market place, with Social, Mobile, Cloud , consumerization of IT and big data becoming very important. Also the session came back on topic with the announcement of DB2 Express – C 9.7.5 being made available today. From this session I learnt:

1. IBM has a big data offering with a basic (express – C) version and an enterprise version
2. InfoSphere Big Insights will connect to DB2 -woot. Heres the good bit you can query the unstructured data from DB2 SQL!!!!
3. Russia has 151% mobile penetration, meaning every other person in Russia has more then one mobile!!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Although I may change the last session to D8: Stuffed with great enhancements.