Last week I attended, and spoke at, the annual North
American IDUG DB2 Tech Conference in Philadelphia, PA. As usual, the event was busy
and chock full of useful and interesting DB2 information.
My week started on Sunday with the IBM gold consultant briefing,
whereby IBM talks to the gold consultants about their upcoming plans and
solicits feedback from us. I can’t really share with you what happened there,
but as is almost always the case, it was time well spent.
The conference kicked off in earnest on Monday
with the keynote from IBMers Tim Vincent and Namik Hrle titled “Big Data,
Analytics and the Future of Data Management.” Tim and Namik discussed
how the growth of data is fueling innovation causing a big change in the way
value is created. Some of the key takeaways from the keynote, for me at least,
were:
- The predominant source of Big Data for most projects is still structured transactions
- Primary focus of most data projects is usually on understanding customers
- There is a trend toward self-service
- Clearly there is value in Hadoop but you can't replace all your DBMSes with it!
Perhaps the most salient tidbit shared at the keynote address
was this: “People have forgotten, or never truly understood, how complex data
integration actually is.” I think this is true; all too often people
underestimate how difficult the integration of data will be. And I agree, too,
with sentiment of the presenters who declared that “We need to realize that
data is never going to be in one place.”
The bottom line of the keynote: All of our existing DB2 skills
will still be relevant but must co-exist with skills in newer technologies like
NoSQL and Hadoop.
Good stuff!
Some of the other highlights of the week:
- Attendance seemed to be higher than at the past few IDUG
conferences. And I see growth in the number of DB2 for LUW attendees. IDUG, at
least historically, was mostly attended by DB2 for z/OS folks. And it is
probably still true that more z/OS folks attend than LUW folks, but the LUW
attendance continues to grow and may surpass z/OS at some point! Of course, this
is all based on my unscientific eyeballing of attendees at presentations.
- My session on DB2 performance had a full room and nobody
seemed to nod off or run for the exits while I spoke. I also delivered a VSP for Dell to a room full of DBAs and developers, as well as a couple of presentations for DataKinetics during an evening session. So that was all good!
- I attended a couple of sessions on newer features of DB2 and
how some of them are under-utilized. I think this speaks to a few trends
hitting the world of DB2 these days. Number one: training is drying up. If you
don’t get training on new features it is hard to use them appropriately. Number
two: failure to take advantage of free learning opportunities like webinars and
freely-available PDF manuals:
- The vendor exhibit hall was active and well-attended
throughout the week. All the usual suspects were there like BMC, CA, dbi, Dell,
and IBM, but there were some newer (at least to IDUG) companies, too, like
DataKinetics and Imperva.
- The educational seminars were integrated into the conference this year. And they did not cost extra to attend. That means that more people attended ed seminars this year (at least I think they did) and the conference offered more value to attendees looking for more in-depth education than can be gained by an hour session.
All in all, the 2015 North American IDUG Tech Conference was
a big success. And it is not too early to start planning for next year’s
conference, which will be in Austin, TX. Finally, I’ll be able to drive to an
IDUG… see you there in 2016!
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