IDUG EMEA 2026 Porto – Day 2….
…Or day 1 for some of us. For reasons too mind-numbingly tedious to share, I could not be here for the first formal day of IDUG EMEA 2026, and spent most of the day commuting from an island off the coast of Norway, including a fascinating 3 hours in the departure lounge at Oslo, listening to an extended speaker phone conversation by a fairly inebriated Irish chap discussing the price of drugs in Thailand.
However, having dragged my sorry carcass over to the Conference Centre, there was a full day of content to make up for it. I flew the Triton flag for Damir Wilder and Iqbal Goralwalla on Zero Downtime Dreams: A Newcomer’s Guide to Db2 Resilience. In the space of 60 minutes the guys covered Backups, HADR, Pacemaker, pureScale, CDC and QREP. And a few other bells and whistles too. A huge amount of content in a short space of time but they gave a very detailed overview.
The next session was AI Query Optimizer: Smarter Plans, Less Tuning by Liam Finnie, which I approached with some trepidation. Not because I thought the content would be inadequate; quite the reverse. I’m doing a presentation on Wednesday on the AI Query Optimizer and Liam being the very smart cookie that he is, I thought Liam might cover everything I was going to and in much more detail. But he’s from the IBM Labs and is a mathematician, so his coverage was very technical and detailed; the nuts and bolts of the product (plus some interesting insights into what they are brewing up for the next release). Mine is more “this is what it’s like at the coalface” when AI Optimiser starts running. We’ll see.
I was Moderator for SQL in Action: One Statement to Rule Them All – MERGE and integrated SQL operations by Michael Tiefenbacher. Not that he needs any introduction, having been to countless previous IDUGs and being awarded Speaker of the Year at last year’s IDUG. Michael always has something fascinating to share; I’ve used the MERGE statement, CTEs and the NEW, FINAL and OLD tables fairly extensively (I thought). I hadn’t appreciated the myriad ways they can be combined. Take a look at his presentation when it’s available for download.
Lastly Mining db2mon with Ken Shaffer. Ken is always interesting and he and I gravitate towards one another as the day closes as we share some mutual interests outside of Db2 (beer and flying, but not, I hasten to add, at the same time).
Another packed day tomorrow but one that will stretch the mind, no doubt.