A Report From SHARE

As regular readers of this blog know, I regularly attend and speak at the SHARE user conferences held twice annually. The Spring 2007 SHARE conference is being held this week, February 12 thru 16, 2007, in Tampa, Florida. It is now Wednesday, mid-way through the week, and time for me to post a quick update of what is going on at SHARE, from a DB2 point of view.

First of all, I’ve been privileged to deliver two presentations this week. The first is one of the perennial favorites called “A DB2 Performance Tuning Roadmap.” I’ve been delivering this presentation now, in various forms and with various changes, for about 8 years. And every time I think it is time to retire it, I hear from a user group or a conference that is interested in having me present it. And every time I get good feedback. I guess that is not so surprising, I mean, after all, performance is always one of those topics to raise interest among all DBAs and many developers. This particular presentation works as an overview of the three basic components of database performance management: that is, you need to manage and tune the application/SQL, the database objects, and the DBMS/subsystem. All three are integral to optimizing DB2 performance and the presentation walks through the basics of each of the three areas and offers guidance and suggestions.

The second presentation I delivered is called “Change Control for DB2 Access Paths” and it is a bit newer. The premise of this presentation is that organizations need to REBIND for performance, but they also need to control change in their production environment. In the presentation I discuss the issues involved in BIND/REBIND management and then introduce how NEON Enterprise Software’s Bind ImpactExpert can provide a solution.

OK, so much for my presentations, what else is happening DB2-wise at SHARE this week? Well, a lot of the presentations are by IBMers focusing on DB2 9 for z/OS. Even though this new version has not been officially released yet, IBM is getting the word out early so we all can understand the benefits of this new release – and also, so we can understand that it is not the goliath that V8 was (nay, let’s say is).

Roger Miller has offered a couple of great presentations on migration and performance issues, and Willie Favero spoke about all of the great new SQL features and functionality that will be available in DB2 9. Then there was the update on the DB2 utilities and what is happening to them in DB2 9… And there is a lot of good news – to net it out, more online utilities, more availability, and less CPU.

If you’re an IMS person, then there has been a lot of coverage of IMS Version 10 here, too. I haven’t personally attended many of the IMS sessions, but I’ve gathered handouts that cover IMS V10 dynamic resource definition, transaction manager enhancements, and database and DBRC enhancements.

And the zNextGen program, that is spearheaded by NEON Enterprise Software's own Kristine Harper, offered an interesting program this week as well. One of the highlights was a fun presentation by Cheryl Watson, a well-reknowned expert in the mainframe world.

Basically, there is a lot of education going on in Tampa this week for mainframe database zealots… and I’m glad I’m hear to soak it up. If you weren’t able to make it to Tampa, consider trying to get to the Fall 2007 SHARE conference in San Diego, CA this August.