Plan to Attend IDUG This November to Improve Your DB2 Skills

It is almost that time of year again, time for the annual European IDUG conference. And as anyone who has ever attended this conference can tell you, it will be chock full of news, education, and networking opportunities for DB2 programmers, DBAs, sysprogs, and users! And you can take advantage of great offers including FREE IBM certification training and DB2 migration workshops!

So be sure to register for the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, 13-18 November 2011, at the Clarion Congress Hotel Prague. If you register on or before 17 October 2011 and receive a discount of EUR 275.

IDUG is also extending the following special offers:

• Multiple Delegate Discount
  
  For every three individuals who register from the same organisation, a fourth may attend at the discounted rate of EUR 730.
• Mentor Program
  
  If you have attended three previous IDUG DB2 Conferences, you are eligible to bring a first-time colleague to Prague for an 80% discount off the full registration fee.
• One-Day Educational Seminars - Friday, 18 November 2011
  
  Registration for paid full conference delegates is EUR 450; the cost for just the one-day seminar is EUR 495. Select from the following session topics:
  
  - DB2 10 for z/OS - In Depth, Phil Grainger, Cogito
  
  - DB2 Intermediate and Advanced SQL, Daniel Luksetich, Yevich Lawson & Assoc Inc.
  
  - I Didn't Know DB2 did THAT!, Bonnie Baker, Bonnie Baker Corporation
  
  - Optimising DB2 for z/OS System Performance Using DB2 Statistics Trace, John Campbell, IBM Corporation
  
  - Rocket Science: DB2 for LUW Performance Analysis and Tuning Workshop, Scott Hayes, DBI

Register Today!

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I'll Be Tweeting Live From IDUG

For those of you who use Twitter, make sure you are following me next week (http://www.twitter.com/craigmullins) as I will be tweeting my experiences from the IDUG conference in Anaheim.

If you aren't planning to go, you can follow my Tweets to hear what is going on... and if you are attending the show, you can follow my Tweets to hear my perspective on things...

I arrive in Anaheim Tuesday afternoon, so I will miss the kickoff, but I'll be there the rest of the week.

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IDUG NA 2010, Days Two and Three

I’ve been running around kinda busy the past couple of days here at IDUG in Tampa, so I got a bit behind in blogging about the conference. So, today I’m combining two days of thoughts into one blog post.

(For a summary of IDUG Day One, click here.)

I started off day two by attending Brent Gross’ presentation on extracting the most value from .NET and ODBC applications. Brent discussed some of the things to be aware of when developing with .NET, an important “thing” being awareness that .NET is designed to work in a disconnected data architecture. So applications will not go through data a row at a time but instead send the data to the application and let it process it there. As an old mainframe DBA that caused alarm bells to ring.

I also got the opportunity to hear Dave Beulke discuss Java DB2 developer performance best practices. Dave delivered a lot of quality information, including the importance of developing quality code because Java developers reuse code – and you don’t want bad code being reused everywhere, right?

Dave started out mentioning how Java programmer are usually very young and do not have a lot of database experience. So DBAs need to get some Java knowledge and work closely with Java developers to ensure proper development. He also emphasized the importance of understanding the object to relational mapping method.

From a performance perspective Dave noted the importance of understanding the distributed calls (how many, where located, and bandwidth issues), controlling commit scope, and making sure your servers have sufficient memory. He also indicated that it is important to be able to track how many times Java programs connect to the database. He suggested using a server connection pool and to be sure that threads are always timed out after a certain period of time.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Dave promoted the use of pureQuery, which can be used to turn dynamic JDBC into static requests. Using pureQuery can improve performance (perhaps as much as 25 percent), as well as simplifying debugging & maintenance.

Dave also discussed how Hibernate can cause performance problems. Which brings me to the first session I attended on day three, John Mallonee’s session titled Wake Up to Hibernate. Hibernate is a persistent layer that maps Java objects to relational tables. It provides an abstraction layer between DB2 and your program. And it can also be thought of as a code generator. Hibernate plugs into popular IDEs, such as Eclipse and Rational tools. It is open source, and part of JBoss Enterprise Middleware (JBoss is a division of Red Hat).

John walked attendees through Hibernate, discussing the Java API for persistence, its query capabilities (including HQL, or Hibernate Query Language), and configuration issues. Examples of things that are configurable include JDBC driver, connection URL, user name, DataSource, connection pool settings, SQL controls (logging, log formatting), and the mapping file location.

HQL abstracts SQL. It is supposed to simplify query coding, but from what I saw of it in the session, I am dubious. John warned, too, that when HQL is turned into SQL the SQL won’t necessarily look the way you are used to seeing it. He recommended to setup the configuration file such that it formats the generated SQL or it won’t be very readable. John noted that one good thing about HQL is that you cannot easily write code with literals in them; it forces you to use parameter markers.

OK, so why can Hibernate be problematic? John talked about four primary concerns:

1. SQL is obscured
2. performance can be bad with generated code
3. Hibernate does not immediately support new DB2 features
4. Learning curve can be high

But he also noted that as you learn more about these problems -- and how Hibernate works -- that things tend to improve. Finally (at least with regard to Hibernate) John recommends that you should consider using HQL for simple queries, native SQL for advanced queries, for special situations use JDBC, and to achieve the highest performance use native DB2 SQL (e.g. stored procedure).

I also attended two presentations on the DB2 for z/OS optimizer. Terry Purcell gave his usual standout performance on optimization techniques. I particularly enjoyed his advice on what to say when someone asks why the optimizer chose a particular path: “Because it thinks that is the lowest cost access path.” After all, the DB2 optimizer is a cost-based optimizer. So if it didn’t choose the “best” path then chances are you need to provide the optimizer with better statistics.

And Suresh Sane did a nice job in his presentation in discussing the optimization process and walking thru several case studies.

All-in-all, it has been a very productive IDUG conference… but then again, I didn’t expect it to be anything else! Tomorrow morning I deliver my presentation titled “The Return of the DB2 Top Ten Lists.” Many of you have seen my original DB2 top ten lists presentation, but this one is a brand new selection of top ten lists… and I’m looking forward to delivering it for the first time at IDUG…

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IDUG Tampa 2010, Day One

As usual, the North American IDUG conference is proving to be a hectic, yet enjoyable and informative time. The days are packed from morning til evening with technical sessions, networking, and running from here to there and back again.

Tuesday was the first day for normal IDUG sessions (the day-long seminars were moved to Monday this year), and the day was dominated (for me at least) by DB2 10 sessions. The spotlight session by Jeff Josten was an information-packed 90 minutes overview of DB2 10 that can only be described as drinking from a firehose. Myself and about 200 other curious attendees sat in attention as Jeff discussed the features that back up the themes of Versionn 10, which are efficiency, resilience, and growing new workloads on DB2 for z/OS.

Jeff didn’t share a GA date for the new version, nor would anyone else from IBM this week, but it has been strongly hinted that it could be before the end of the year (2010).

The biggest “thing” being touted by IBM about DB2 10 is the performance gains it delivers right out-of-the-box. Jeff discussed IBM’s performance objectives as historically being to deliver less than a 5% performance regression from release to release. But things have perked up recently. For DB2 9, most customers reported no regression or gain out of box. And the new goal is no longer containing regression, but delivering gain. For DB2 10, the expectation is that many customers will reduce CPU time 10% to 20% right out-of-the-box.

In IBM’s labs, Jeff indicated that the out-of-the-box CPU reduction numbers for traditional workloads are ranging from 5-10% and for newer workloads (e.g. TCP/IP, stored procedures) the improvement is as much as 20% in lab measurements. And when you start using new functionality, you can reasonably expect to see up to 10% CPU reduction. Of course, Jeff was careful to note that these are pre-GA numbers so things could change, even though there is no expectation that they will change.

Additionally, there is a lot of focus on scalability in DB2 10. Shops can expect to support 5x to 10x more concurrent users, up to 20,000 per subsystem. This is possible due to virtual storage relief: threads have been moved above the bar.

Jeff went on to cover a lot of additional new functionality to be delivered with DB2 10 including parellel index update during INSERT (which should speed up inserts against tables with multiple indexes), DB2’s usage of 1MB page size (z/OS) in buffer pools, multiple SQL access path and performance improvements, efficient caching of dynamic SQL with literals, LOB streaming between DDF and rest of DB2, Workfile spanned records (PBG), INSERT improvements for UTS, solid state disk monitoring and exploitation, temporal data support, timestamp data type improvements, and more.

Hash support is particularly interesting. With hashing you can get direct access to data with a single getpage instead of the multi-getpage approach of b-tree indexing. The targeted use case for hashes is for lookup of a row based upon primary key. The hashing algorithm is stored in the DB2 engine. Never fear, though, because you can still define additional indexes on hashed tables and the optimizer will understand and prefer hashed access when it is possible. (I hear the IMS DBAs out there laughing. DB2 DBAs are now going to need to understand space calculations for hash space and what collisions and overflow means.)

Next up was Roger Miller who covered DB2 10 from a database administration perspective. He began his session by referencing the extra detail that is available in the DB2 10 webcast presentation that Roger did about last month, which is available on the web.

Roger states that a lot of what is at the heart of DB2 10 is about making things easier for DBAs. And then to prove his point he talked for an hour about all of those things. Highlights included the reduced need for REORG, monitoring enhancements, hashing, and pureXML enhancements for usability, scalability, and performance.

A particularly interesting point made by Roger is that query parallelism these days is less about decreasing elapsed time and more about the ability to shuttle workload to a zIIP.

Roger also discussed the ability to skip V9 and go directly from V8 to V10. He also expressed concern that folks who choose to do this not ignore learning all about V9 when they do this. For example, RUNSTATS in V9 had key changes, so shops need to be careful to run RUNSTATS when moving to V10.

Roger also spoke about the significant changes to the DB2 Catalog and DB2 Directory in DB2 10. There are about 60 new table spaces, the links have been removed, inline LOBs are used in many places, and row level locking is used. These changes mean that online REORG works for everything in the catalog & the directory.

He also spoke about the various improvements to security administration in DB2 10. There is a new SECADM authority with no access to data and there is also a new option for DBADM without data access. Another nice new option is DBADM authority for every database in the subsystem. And then there is the ability to REVOKE without cascading, something that DB2 security administrators have been looking for for years!

Changing pace, I attended Billy Sundarrajan’s presentation on “De-mystifying JDBC Universal Drivers – for the z/OS DBA.” The reality is that more and more dynamic SQL applications are being implemented, so knowing about JDBC drivers is a necessity, not a luxury for the mainframe DBA.

Billy discussed the types of JDBC drivers and the installation issues involved. You can connect using a type 2 or type 4 driver. The Type 2 driver connects directly without DB2 Connect gateway; Type 4 driver connects thru DB2 Connect gateway.

He also discussed the benefits of setting end user variables for monitoring and the different properties that can be used for configuration.

Of course, I attended a few other sessions and spent some time at the exhibit hall and caught up with some old friends and… well, this is long enough of a post for the first day… check back tomorrow for a shorter (I promise) synopsis of day two.

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IDUG in Tampa

It is Sunday, May 9, 2010 and I'm posting a brief blog entry today to remind everyone about IDUG in Tampa this week. I will be attending (arrive Monday morning) and I will update my blog with the highlights of what is happening in Tampa this week... so be sure to check in regularly.

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Nominate Someone for the CA IDUG Award for Outstanding Work in DB2

As many of you know, each year CA sponsors an award at IDUG to honor outstanding work with DB2. The only requirement for the award is that you and your company have used DB2, either on the mainframe or distributed system, in a novel, ground-breaking, or cutting-edge manner.

There is no requirement that an entrant organization be based in North America. There is also no requirement that an entrant organization license or use specific CA or other vendor database management tools or that he/she attend the IDUG conference in person. All nominations will be judged by a panel of independent DB2 consultants in conjunction with CA executives.

Nominations are now open through April 26, 2010. To learn more, visit ca.com/awards/db2.

The winner will be announced at the IDUG North America conference, May 10-14, 2010.

Each winner will receive:

• One complimentary full IDUG conference pass for any IDUG Europe or IDUG North America conference held prior to December 2011
  
• Half-day consulting engagements by each of the consultant judges within 12 months of award presentation
  
• Expense reimbursement up to $1,500 either (a) the winner’s travel to an IDUG conference held prior to December 2011 or (b) travel by one of the DB2 consultants for on-site provision of the complimentary consulting services described above
  
• Recognition plaque
  

Submit your project today and get recognized for your outstanding work. Visit ca.com/awards/db2.

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IDUG Europe is Right Around the Corner

Just a quick post today to remind everybody that the annual European IDUG conference will be held next week (the week of October 5, 2009) in Rome, Italy. And it is not too late to ensure that you will be there to hear the latest and greatest news, tips, tricks, and guidelines on our favorite DBMS - IBM's DB2!

For those of you not lucky enough to be there keep an eye on my DB2portal blog here where I will attempt to summarize the key events of the week.

And if you are a Twitter aficionado, be sure to follow me on Twitter as I will try to make regular Tweets about the event (as long as my Blackberry works in Rome).

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Attend the 2009 IDUG North American Conference (at a Discount)

Today's blog post is just a friendly reminder to the DB2 community that the North American IDUG conference is fast approaching. This year's event will be held in Denver, CO from Tuesday May 12, 2009 through Friday, May 15th. And if you act quickly you can attend at a discounted rate using the early bird registration discount coupon valid through March 27th).

And don't forget those day long seminars that IDUG holds before the regular conference. Instead of being on a Sunday, the seminars will be on the Monday before the conference this year! The
Monday-Friday schedule is a departure from previous IDUG conferences, and was done to reduce or even eliminate the need for weekend travel.

IDUG is one of the best places to advance your DB2 knowledge. This year's conference boasts over 120 hours of technical material to be presented by a mix of real-world DB2 users, third-party vendors, DB2 Gold Consultants, IBM Fellows, IBM Distinguished Engineers, IBM Vice Presidents, and dozens of the most sought-after DB2 speakers in the world.

I will be delivering two presentations at this year's IDUG:

• DB2 9: For Developers Only - Wed, 5/13/09 at 1:30 PM
• Counting Down the DB2 Performance Top 40 - Fri, 5/15/09 at 9:00 AM

I will also be participating in the Data Privacy, Security and Audit Compliance special Interest Group (SIG), one of the many SIGs that will be conducted at IDUG.

Attendees will have ample time to meet informally between sessions, or as part of SIGs, discussion panels, or the Thursday night "dine-around" with some of IDUG's most popular presenters. And if you are thinking about getting certified, IDUG is the place to do that! Throughout the conference, IBM will waive the $200 certification test fee for all attendees, with no limit on the number of tests each attendee can take. IBM will offer 40 different certification tests that cover DB2, InfoSphere, U2, Content Management, DataStage, and other IBM Information Management products.

Seriously, you don't want to miss out on all of the wonderful learning and networking opportunities that IDUG offers DB2 professionals. Take the time to check out the IDUG conference details on the web and work on getting your management's approval for this great educational event.

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Counting Down the DB2 Performance Top 40

The title of this blog posting is the title of one of my IDUG NA presentations this year. I'm blogging about it (briefly) today to solicit input and comments. I have my own ideas about the things I'll be covering in this presentation, but if you've got your own favorite performance "thing" that you think should be covered in a Top 40 presentation like this, please share it as a comment here on the blog.

Keep in mind that the presentation is a DB2 for z/OS presentation, so I won't be covering LUW or iSeries stuff.

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There is Still Time to Attend IDUG Regional Forums

Just a quick entry today to remind everyone that IDUG has started conducting regional events. The first one was held last week in San Ramon, California, and next week two events will be held: in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and Kansas City, Missouri, (actually Lenexa, KS). The forums offer you an opportunity to obtain DB2 education rather quickly and inexpensively.

Each Forum offers 2 days of education with 2 tracks: one covering DB2 for z/OS and another covering DB2 for LUW. IDUG is offering full two day registrations for $425 and single day registrations for only $225.

Here are the scheduled dates:

* Camp Hill, PA - November 17 and 18
* Kansas City, MO - November 19 and 20

Check out the links above for the full list of sessions in your area.

I'll be delivering my presentation titled "DB2 9: For Developer's Only" at both of these forums. And there will be many other great speakers there, too!

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Another IDUG in the Books

Well, here it is late in the day on May 22, 2008 and the IDUG North American conference is officially over. And, of course, it was another successful conference!

From the start of the festivities on Monday with the welcome address and keynote session (which can be downloaded here) to the traditional IBM panel and closing session today, IDUG offered consistently high quality education and unparalleled networking opportunities for DB2 professionals.

Usually I blog about the sessions I attend but this year I used Twitter instead to micro-blog the highlights of the sessions I attended right from the sessions using my Treo. I hope you followed my Twitter posts (Tweets, they're called). But even if you didn't it is not too late to follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/craigmullins.

One thing I would like to mention, though, is that it looks like the Special Interest Groups are finally being taken seriously. Used to be that the SIGs were put on the schedule late in the day and almost nobody showed up. This year, there were more SIGs and they were scheduled at better times throughout the day - and people showed up for them... and participated. I very much enjoyed participating as a subject matter expert in the Changing Role of the DBA SIG, and I attended a couple other SIGs that were very worthwhile, too!

If you didn't get to the conference this year (or even if you did and missed a few sessions) IDUG will be making audio recordings from this year’s technical sessions available on the IDUG Online Learning Center in July 2008. Full-conference attendees get twelve complimentary downloads with their registration. If you did not attend, individual sessions can be downloaded for a nominal fee. You can check out the IDUG Online Learning Center here (again, that is where the session downloads will be).

And if you just want to voyeuristically take a look at what you missed, you can check out photos from this year's conference online at http://idug2008northamerica.site.shutterfly.com/.

Thanks for another great event, IDUG... and hopefully we'll see you next year in Denver, CO (May 11-15, 2009).

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Twitter

After listening to John Dvorak (on Cranky Geeks) talk about Twitter I decided to try it out this week. And I quickly found some other DB2 folks out there twittering (Willie, Troy).

I put up Twitter feeds on my home page and here on my blog, too (it is over there on the right). I'm not sure if I'll stick with Twittering long-term, but I probably will - it is a bit addictive. If you want to try it out yourself, click on the follow me on Twitter link over on the right hand side of this page - or click here if you don't want to be bothered tracking it down over there!

I noticed, too, that Willie Favero will be twittering during the upcoming IDUG conference next week and since I can recognize a good idea when I hear/read/see one (good idea, Willie), I think I'll try it, too. So sign up on Twitter before next week if you want to virtually attend IDUG by following our twittering.

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