The Chronicles of IDUG EMEA 2023 Prague

Day -1 of the IDUG EMEA conference (Saturday): Getting to the conference ahead of time is always a good thing as it allows you to take care of the tourist attractions at leisure.

Day 0 of the conference (Sunday): When it all became busy and interesting.

The conference is not officially open yet (it starts tomorrow) so, there are no presentations scheduled for today, but the time is not wasted:

I attended a very interesting workshop about Pacemaker installations in various flavours of the cloud – AWS, Azure, and GC (formerly known as the GCP). I learned the subtle differences and nuances between each of those environments.

Day 1 of the conference (Monday): Kickoff

Even though the conference has only just started today, I have already attended several very interesting and insightful presentations, from “Latest from the Labs” news, over the Db2 catalogue intricacies, db2mon details, to the SQL joins in action and advanced performance tuning. All this in one day!

The most interesting thing I learned today is how you can write the simplest possible SQL query to join two tables in more than one way, using only a different syntax.

The initial guesstimates in the audience ranged from 4 to 6, with one brave attendee going for 20 alternatives, until we got to the final number at the end of the presentations: there are more than 1500 different ways how it can be done!!!

Truly fascinating! 😊

Last but not least, I must praise the brilliant keynote session on the Db2 history, present and future, delivered by IBM Gold Consultant, Julian Stuhler, which took the whole audience (both present and virtual) on a trip from the early days of Db2 until today, spanning more than 40 years.

And what an awesome journey it was, I will remember it for a long time!

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