DB2 Symposium 2011

Today's blog post is about a great symposium dedicated to the topic of DB2. It is called, appropriately enough, the DB2 Symposium. DB2 Symposium is a three day training event with one day seminars presented by well-known DB2 consultants. I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate this year by the primary organizer of the event, Klaas Brant. For those of you who don't know him, Klaas is a well-respected DB2 consultant based in the Netherlands... and an all around great guy.

Why should I attend the DB2 Symposium you may ask? Don't IDUG and IOD provide everything I need in the way of events? Well, DB2 Symposium fills the gap between a conference and a multi-day training course. The DB2 Symposium is unique because you can participate for 1, 2, or 3 days, depending on your needs and budget.

Although it has not been to the USA the past few years, the DB2 Symposium is a regular, well-known event in Europe! And after a period of absence the DB2 Symposium is back in the USA.

The USA DB2 Symposium is happening soon, so you'll need to act fast if you want to participate. It occurs March 21-23, 2011 in the Dallas, Texas area. More precisely, at the Hilton Arlington (2401 East Lamar Boulevard, Arlington, Texas, USA 76006-7503). Each day the training sessions start at 9.00am and end at around 5.00pm.

But registration on site is not possible, you must pre-register online... so plan ahead!

My session is on March 21st and it is called DB2 Developer's Guide Comes Alive! This one day session, covers tips, techniques, and procedures you need to know in order to excel at administering and using DB2 on the mainframe.The material is based upon DB2 Developer's Guide, the best-selling DB2 for z/OS book on the market. Additionally, the course material will contain references to sections of the book for students to find additional material on each topic after the sessions. Topics to be covered will include:

• A performance tuning roadmap for managing DB2 application, database and system performance. You will learn SQL coding and tuning techniques, guidance for database optimization and reorganization, coverage of buffer pool settings and parameters for performance.
• Logical and physical database design recommendations for DB2, so you can build and maintain effective DB2 databases immediately. Includes discussion of standards, logical to physical translation, data types, usage of nulls, and more.
• Information and guidance on BINDing and REBINDing, along with a discussion of the most important parameters.
• Along the way we'll look at locking, access paths, statistics, indexing and more.
• And even though the current edition of the book covers through DB2 V8, this course adds coverage of some of the newer features added to DB2 in versions 9 and 10 that can boost your productivity and performance.

If you own the book already, bring it along and I'll be happy to autograph it for you. And then you can use it along with the course materials... and if you don't own it already, you'll probably want to grab a copy after attending the seminar... you can always find a link to buy my books on the front page of my web site at http://www.craigsmullins.com.

So register for the DB2 Symposium today... and I'll see you in Dallas, pardner!