Another Great IDUG DB2 Tech Conference Concludes

Last week, the annual North American IDUG DB2 Tech Conference was held in Phoenix, AZ... and, as usual, it was a great week with a LOT of educational and networking opportunities.

The week started off with a great selection of day long seminars conducted by industry luminaries, highlighted by the likes of Bonnie Baker, Susan Lawson, Dan Luksetich, Judy Nall, Roger Sanders and more. There was something for everyone whether you were a newbie or an old hat... using DB2 on LUW or z/OS... wanting to cram for certification or just learn something new.

On Tuesday the day started off with a bang as Dr. Vladimir Bacvanski, Founder of SciSpike, regaled the attendees on the nuances of Big Data and NoSQL. And he didn't use Powerpoint slides! He drew all of his stuff live, free-hand, much to the enjoyment of everybody. Especially enjoyable was his big pile of data (see below)...

After Valdimir's inspiring talk Leon Katsnelson of IBM came up to talk about the Big Data industry trends driving innovation at IBM. My next session on the first day at IDUG was another highlight of the week -- the DB2 for z/OS spotlight session (Trends and Directions). This session talked about what has already been delivered and what might be coming next (code name: Cypress).

I don't want to get into walking through every presentation I attended during the week, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of informative material shared with IDUG attendees. If you work with DB2 for a living, you really should try to get to this conference every year!

And I delivered two presentations at this year's event. The first was titled A Big Data Roadmap for the DB2 Professional, in which I explained and defined Big Data and NoSQL terminology and use cases... and offered up my opinions on Big Data and how it can/will impact the IT industry and the place of relational DBMS within it.

My second presentation was a VSP for Datavail, a DBA managed services company. In this presentation I offered up a definition of Database Administration as a management discipline and provided some best practices for DB2 DBAs. Datavail will be sponsoring me later this year in a webinar on the same topic, so be sure to keep an eye on my blog for an announcement of when that will be coming!

Other than the traditional hour long presentations, IDUG offers a fantastic opportunity for networking, especially at the vendor exhibition hall. Here I am catching up with Dave Beulke, Judy Nall, and Gerry Hodge:

And I also was able to catch up with friends I rarely see, like Peter Ong (see below), except for at conferences like IDUG:

Another highlight of the conference was the second keynote, delivered on Thursday by Donald Feinberg of Gartner. I was particularly happy to hear his presentation on data trends, especially his take on Big Data, which was remarkably similar to the one I had espoused earlier in the day!

The week also was highlighted by lots of business meetings, lots of casual conversations with friends and colleagues, great food, and I even got the chance to sit down with Dan Luksetich and record a podcast on DB2 auditing with him... I'll be sure to blog about the podcast when it goes live on Dan's site.

So, all in all, IDUG week was fantastic success... but that is no surprise to those of us who make IDUG a regular, annual event. Hope to see you there next year (in Philadelphia).