On my way back home now, having just attended the IDUG EMEA 2026 conference in Porto, “city of steep hills/steps”, a phrase coined during the conference! 😊 Looking back from last Saturday, when I had to drag myself out of bed very early to catch my 6am flight to Porto, to sitting in the auditorium earlier, listening to Henrik Loeser deliver a keynote on the importance of Data Privacy, I have to wonder: where did the week vanish?
It was for sure a jam-packed, productive week for me.
Starting with technical content, Saturday was a full day attending the IBM Technical Advisory Board meeting. Lots of information was shared and, as always, lively discussions.
On Sunday, I attended a workshop on Pacemaker led by Thomas Rech in which we went through how to set up Db2 with Pacemaker on the AWS and Azure clouds. An afternoon well spent.
My colleague Damir Wilder and I co-presented sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. The first one was on the various resilience options available in the Db2 toolbox, which we thought would be particularly useful for someone new to Db2. In the second, we shared our experiences doing Db2 upgrades for our customers on Windows and Linux, hoping attendees could avoid a few hair-pulling moments we went through!
On Wednesday, I was an invited panellist together with Db2 experts from the IBM Labs on the Db2 Expert Panel, which was an hour full of questions, answers and interactive discussions between the panellists and the attendees.
Evenings were spent attending Partner social events. It was great reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. The Triton gang did take time out to have a lovely dinner together, which became quite lively after Adrian Collet joined us! No details (too gory to repeat here!) were spared in best man stories, and tips on surviving a father of the bride speech. We would have left the restaurant much earlier had one of us not spent so long convincing the ever-so-polite waiter to give him a doggy bag for the leftover drinks!
A big thank you to Sven Heidorn and his CPC team for all their dedication in putting together and executing such a great conference.
Next year will be an autumn to spring pivot for IDUG EMEA, with the conference taking place April 26-30, 2027, at the IBM Software Lab in Ehningen, Germany. Hope to make it and see everyone again!