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UK DB2 User Group

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The UK DB2 User Group is a Working Group of the UK GSE organisation and covers all aspects of DB2 on both the Mainframe (z/OS) and Distributed (LUW) platforms. We welcome anyone interested in DB2, whether Novice or Expert to join us. If you'd like to be added to our mailing list please contact our Membership Secretary, Sue Alder.

User Group Meetings

The next meeting will be part of the GSE conference on 1-2 November 2011 at Whittlebury Hall near Towcester.

The draft agenda for the DB2 on zSeries stream is as follows:

Tuesday 1st November

10:45	DB2 10 Security Enhancements	Mike Bracey, IBM	DB2 10 introduces new security features that allow users to meet emerging regulatory requirements and satisfy auditors with minimum impact to applications. This session covers these key features: 1) how the new system authorities help reduce the dependency on SYSADM authority and control the implicit privileges needed by DBA 2) how audit policies allow users to dynamically audit any table and generate an audit trail of those using one of the administrative authorities 3) A new data privacy mechanism, called ""row and column access control,"" allows users to define privacy and security policies on a table level 4) how to use a temporal data to create an audit trail of changes without impacting existing applications
11:45	Short break
12:00	Collecting DB2 Measurements in SMF	Fabio Massimo Ottaviani, EPV Technologies	The DB2 Instrumentation Facility Component (IFC) provides a powerful trace facility that you can use to record DB2 data and events. After an introduction to the DB2 measurement infrastructure, we’ll focus on DB2 statistics and accounting information showing examples of how to use SMF collected data to tune DB2 subsystems and applications.
13:00	Lunch Break
14:00	Buffer Pools Through the Ages	Andy Ward, CA	This session will initially take a brief look at how buffer pools have evolved over time. It will then concentrate on some of the more recently added functionality in this area in versions 8, 9 and 10 of DB2 and investigate what impact some of these changes will have for your subsystems.
15:00	Tea/coffee break
15:30	Test Data Management : Concepts and Methods for DB2	Kai Stroh, UBS Hainer	Clients require fast copies in their "secure zones" in everything from Unit Testing to Production Testing. While creating secure strategies and processes in providing test data for clients, Kai's projects normally involve copying regularly, quickly and reliably anything from gigabytes to terabytes (up to 100TB) of DB2 data. Kai will give some insights into the merging of two of Germany's largest banks (starting in 2009) and what some other long-time DB2 users in USA and Japan are doing. He will present their achievements in merging data across diverse applications and in creating test data for use in secure zones as well as moving test data to some "suspect zones" at contracted third parties.
16:30	Short break
16:45	Hash Access; The DB2 HDAM Table	Phil Grainger, Cogito/GDBS	As a former DL/1 DBA (remember DL/1?) I was particularly excited to see Hash Access to DB2 data added to DB2 10 So, for the people who have only ever worked on a relational databse, just what IS Hash Access and why do I think it's a "good thing"? Well, it gives SQL access to a single row from a DB2 table with ONE I/O - no messing around with indexes or table space scans - just go and grab the row. How does it work and where should it be used? Well you'll just have to come to this session to find out
17:45	Close

Wednesday 2nd November

9:00 Time Travelling with DB2 10 Julian Stuhler, Triton Consulting Industry regulations and competitive pressures are prompting IT managers to maintain more data for longer periods of time and to provide better ways for business users to analyse past, current, and future events. The new temporal table support in DB2 10 for z/OS enables the database to keep track of both business and system events, making application development and maintenance simpler and more cost effective. In this presentation, Julian will provide an overview of DB2 10’s unique temporal capabilities and explore some of the business benefits they can provide.

10:00 Tea/coffee break

10:30 A DB2 Workload Tuning Methodology Phil Grainger, Cogito/GDBS Instead of tuning your SQL one statement at a time, why not look to the advantages of tuning an entire workload of SQL instead? Workload SQL tuning can not only provide faster returns on the investment in tuning time and effort but will usually provide bigger savings of cpu and other resources. Workload tuning can also avoid the unfortunate "Silly Putty" situation where improving the performance of one SQL statement can have unexpected detrimental effects elsewhere! Apart from tactical emergency corrections to individual SQL statements, workload SQL tuning should be the preferred mechanism to ensure that application SQL and the underlying database design work together in the most efficient way possible This presentation walks through a typical workload tuning methodology

11:30 Short break

11:45 DB2 9 and 10 Optimiser Improvements Mike Bracey, IBM In this session, participants find out if they are taking advantage of the important query optimisation enhancements delivered in DB2 9 and 10 for z/OS. This session has been designed to ensure that participants understand the benefits of each, including the importance of the RUNSTATS enhancements to the optimizer, enhanced plan management and explain, subquery optimization, enhancements to indexing, safe query optimisation, improvements to complex OR and IN list processing; RUNSTATS management and performance improvements.

12:45 Lunch

13:45 Accessing XML Data for SQL Programmers Gareth Jones, IBM Aimed at DB2 DBAs and Systems Programmers supporting DB2 applications accessing XML data, this presentation includes a brief introduction to XML and delves more deeply into the navigation of XML documents using XPath. This enables us to look at how SQL applications can process data in XML documents, using features introduced in DB2 V9 and V10, by embedding XPath expressions in SQL statements.

14:45 Tea/coffee break

15:15 DB2 8 -> 10 Skip Migration Raymond Bell, BMC Migration from V8 of DB2 to DB2 10 (‘skip migration’) is a tempting feature for many customers who have not yet moved to DB2 9. Is it a good idea? As always, the answer is that ‘It depends’, and each customer must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of migrating directly to DB2 10 versus stopping (however briefly) at DB2 9. This presentation will explain the mechanics of skip migration, discuss the benefits and the risks, and give you some ideas and tools to make the best business decision for your environment.

16:15 Wrap-up & Feedback session

16:30 Close

The draft agenda for the DB2 LUW stream is as follows:

Wednesday 2nd November

9:00 DB2 pureScale Feature demonstration and V9.8 FP4 new features Oleg Tyschenko, IBM This presentation provides an architectural overview and a live demo of the DB2 pureScale Feature which is deployed on a 3 node cluster environment to demonstrate continuous availability in action. New features available with FP4 will be discussed, such as serviceability, monitoring enhancements and the geographically dispersed DB2 pureScale cluster, which provides the scalability and application transparency of a cross-site configuration that enables active/active system availability.

10:00 Tea/coffee break

10:30 DB2 pureScale Feature cluster services and performance overview Massimiliano Gallo, IBM This presentation provides an overview of the tightly integrated DB2 cluster services of the DB2 pureScale Feature. We will walk through common use case scenarios such as failure and automatic recovery of DB2 processes and also provide related performance figures.

11:30 Short break

11:45 HADR Experiences Sathyaram Sannasi, Independent Consultant This presentation covers my recent experiences on HADR implementations - HADR scenarios, implementation tips, frequently asked questions, monitoring and tuning.

12:45 Lunch

13:45 Oracle Compatibility Michael Feehilly, IBM Limited choice of database can be a frustration for customers and many feel constrained by a single vendor, a limited hardware choice or prohibitive costs of migration to a different platform. This presentation discusses the various versions and high level feature functionality of DB2 9.7 LUW and explains how the Oracle compatibility features of DB2 v9.7 make it easier than ever to migrate from Oracle and other databases to DB2. We will review some of the differences between Oracle's and DB2s architecture, explain how the Oracle Compatibility feature works, the tools and process we use complete the migration.

14:45 Tea/coffee break

15:15 DB2 for SAP Richard Fisher, IBM SAP applications depend entirely on the database engine. DB2 is the only database specifically optimised for SAP and this presentation explores what the "Optimised for SAP" slogan really means to your DBAs and managers and hear how DB2 enhanced compatibility simplified SAP upgrades for customers from a wide range of industries.

16:15 Wrap-up & Feedback session

16:30 Close

The last meeting was on 11th April at the Manor House within CA's European Headquarters at Ditton Park near Slough. You can find the Presentation Materials arranged in Agenda order by clicking here, or on the Meetings Page. The material is also available organized by topic (along with all previous materials from our meetings over the past 10 years) on the Tech Info Page.

Scottish DB2 User Group (SDUG)

We're very pleased to be able to host a website for the SDUG Group based in Edinburgh. Notices of future meetings and all presentation materials from previous events can be found on the SDUG Page or by following the link at the top of any page. Presentations from past SDUG meetings can also be found sorted by topic on the Tech Info Page, along with our own materials.

Other News

Darwin is a very useful and popular utility that has been available from this website for some time. It provides an alternative to using DSNTEP2 for customers who don't use PL/I. It is provided in COBOL source form, with sample JCL and usage notes. Thanks to the generosity of Gary Joehlin and Sallie Mae Inc. in the USA we are now able to provide an improved version of DARWIN. This new version corrects truncation of DSNTIAR messages, increases the maximum size of SQL statements from 32Kb to 2Gb, and supports the DECIMAL(31) data type. To download a copy of this new improved version please go to the Shareware Page.

We have created a Group within the LinkedIn Networking site for those in the UK DB2 Community. This provides an easy method for members of the UK and Scottish User Groups and others associated with DB2 in the UK to contact each other, pass on useful information and ask questions. Please feel free to join at LinkedIn UK User Community. Other useful networking groups which you might be interested in joining include The World of DB2 for z/OS and DB2 z/OS What's On!

The IBM Betaworks team have prepared a Technical Education Series on topics related to DB2 9 for z/OS which are available to downloaded from the Web at no charge. Each session contains a Windows Media File containing a recording of the presentation and an Acrobat pdf file of the materials. To find the sessions, start at www.ibm.com/db2 and click on the DB2 for z/OS link in the body of the page. Next, click on the 'Support' link from the box on the left. Finally type "db2 betaworks" in the Search box and click Search. As at the time this page was updated there were 12 sessions available. Many thanks to Paul Fletcher of IBM for providing this information.

The following site contains a number of IBM webcasts, Teleconferences, Demos, Events and White Papers for both DB2 and IMS. The url is rather complex, so it's best to find it by following this link. You need to register to gain access to the content but doing so is free.

Conferences and Web based Presentations

We regularly receive notices about Conferences and Web-based presentations which may be interesting to our members and which we publish in the table below. If you're interested in having your own event published here, please feel free email our webmaster, Raymond Bell. Please note that we will not advertise Tools and Utilities sessions here - the content must relate to core DB2 activities.

Date and Time Details and Link

Available On Demand Replays of IBM Teleconferences and Webcasts can be found by following this link. The most recent of these sessions were:
DB2 for z/OS Optimizing INSERT Performance presented by John Campbell
DB2 X for z/OS Technical Preview presented by Jeff Josten
Hints and tips to get the most out of IBM DB2 9 for z/OS presented by Namik Hrle
Looking to Upgrade to DB2 9 for z/OS and improve productivity & reduce costs? presented by Maria McCoy
DB2 10 for z/OS: Helping you improve operational efficiencies and gain competitive advantage by Roger Miller and David Beulke

October 24th - 28th 2010 IBM InformationOnDemand conference was held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Centre in Las Vegas, Nevada in October 2010. See the IOD website for more details.

November 8th - 12th 2010 2010 IDUG EMEA was held at the Hilton Vienna Hotel in Vienna, Austria in November 2010. See the IDUG EMEA website for more details.

Jan 25th 2011 Why is DB2 for z/OS better than Oracle RAC? was an IBM webcast highlighting the advantages DB2 for z/OS has over Oracle RAC. Click here for more details and to view the recorded session.

Feb 22nd 2011 Upgrading to DB2 9 or DB2 10 for z/OS — How? When? What is the cost versus benefit? was a webcast by IBM's Roger Miller providing reasons why you should consider migrating to DB2 9 or DB2 10 for z/OS. Click here for more details and to view the recorded session.

May 2nd - 6th 2011 2011 IDUG North America will be held in Anaheim, California in May 2011. See the IDUG NA website for more details.

October 5th - 7th 2011 The DB2 Symposium will be held in London in October. See the the symposium website for more details.

November 1st - 2nd 2011 UK GSE Meeting will be held at Whittlebury Hall near Towcester in November 2011. See the GSE conference website for more details.

Presenting at the UK DB2 User Group

The group would like to hear from you if you have had any interesting experiences with DB2, whether with new or little used functions, or perhaps using well known functions in a novel way. Remember you don't have to prepare a full length session - contributions of any length are always welcome and if you're a User you may qualify for one of our new Presentation Awards of up to £200. The audience is guaranteed to be a friendly one, and there's no better way of raising your profile in the industry and showing off your achievements.

If you have any experience that you feel could be of interest please contact Phil Nelson. Phil would also like to hear from you if you have any suggestions on future presentation topics which might be of interest, and we'll do our best to find a suitable speaker.

Suppliers of DB2 related products and services should be aware that we offer up to two optional 15 minute slots during the lunch break of our own meetings (but not during the UK GSE Conference) where companies can explain new offerings which might be of interest. Please follow this link for more details if you're interested in taking up one of these slots.

Becoming A Committee Member

If you would you like to assist with the organisation and running of our group, and have the commitment, enthusiasm and time to participate, we'd love to hear from you. Details of the current committee can be found here - please feel free to contact any of us if you would like to volunteer or if you have any questions or issues.

9:00	Time Travelling with DB2 10	Julian Stuhler, Triton Consulting	Industry regulations and competitive pressures are prompting IT managers to maintain more data for longer periods of time and to provide better ways for business users to analyse past, current, and future events. The new temporal table support in DB2 10 for z/OS enables the database to keep track of both business and system events, making application development and maintenance simpler and more cost effective. In this presentation, Julian will provide an overview of DB2 10’s unique temporal capabilities and explore some of the business benefits they can provide.
10:00	Tea/coffee break
10:30	A DB2 Workload Tuning Methodology	Phil Grainger, Cogito/GDBS	Instead of tuning your SQL one statement at a time, why not look to the advantages of tuning an entire workload of SQL instead? Workload SQL tuning can not only provide faster returns on the investment in tuning time and effort but will usually provide bigger savings of cpu and other resources. Workload tuning can also avoid the unfortunate "Silly Putty" situation where improving the performance of one SQL statement can have unexpected detrimental effects elsewhere! Apart from tactical emergency corrections to individual SQL statements, workload SQL tuning should be the preferred mechanism to ensure that application SQL and the underlying database design work together in the most efficient way possible This presentation walks through a typical workload tuning methodology
11:30	Short break
11:45	DB2 9 and 10 Optimiser Improvements	Mike Bracey, IBM	In this session, participants find out if they are taking advantage of the important query optimisation enhancements delivered in DB2 9 and 10 for z/OS. This session has been designed to ensure that participants understand the benefits of each, including the importance of the RUNSTATS enhancements to the optimizer, enhanced plan management and explain, subquery optimization, enhancements to indexing, safe query optimisation, improvements to complex OR and IN list processing; RUNSTATS management and performance improvements.
12:45	Lunch
13:45	Accessing XML Data for SQL Programmers	Gareth Jones, IBM	Aimed at DB2 DBAs and Systems Programmers supporting DB2 applications accessing XML data, this presentation includes a brief introduction to XML and delves more deeply into the navigation of XML documents using XPath. This enables us to look at how SQL applications can process data in XML documents, using features introduced in DB2 V9 and V10, by embedding XPath expressions in SQL statements.
14:45	Tea/coffee break
15:15	DB2 8 -> 10 Skip Migration	Raymond Bell, BMC	Migration from V8 of DB2 to DB2 10 (‘skip migration’) is a tempting feature for many customers who have not yet moved to DB2 9. Is it a good idea? As always, the answer is that ‘It depends’, and each customer must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of migrating directly to DB2 10 versus stopping (however briefly) at DB2 9. This presentation will explain the mechanics of skip migration, discuss the benefits and the risks, and give you some ideas and tools to make the best business decision for your environment.
16:15	Wrap-up & Feedback session
16:30	Close

9:00	DB2 pureScale Feature demonstration and V9.8 FP4 new features	Oleg Tyschenko, IBM	This presentation provides an architectural overview and a live demo of the DB2 pureScale Feature which is deployed on a 3 node cluster environment to demonstrate continuous availability in action. New features available with FP4 will be discussed, such as serviceability, monitoring enhancements and the geographically dispersed DB2 pureScale cluster, which provides the scalability and application transparency of a cross-site configuration that enables active/active system availability.
10:00	Tea/coffee break
10:30	DB2 pureScale Feature cluster services and performance overview	Massimiliano Gallo, IBM	This presentation provides an overview of the tightly integrated DB2 cluster services of the DB2 pureScale Feature. We will walk through common use case scenarios such as failure and automatic recovery of DB2 processes and also provide related performance figures.
11:30	Short break
11:45	HADR Experiences	Sathyaram Sannasi, Independent Consultant	This presentation covers my recent experiences on HADR implementations - HADR scenarios, implementation tips, frequently asked questions, monitoring and tuning.
12:45	Lunch
13:45	Oracle Compatibility	Michael Feehilly, IBM	Limited choice of database can be a frustration for customers and many feel constrained by a single vendor, a limited hardware choice or prohibitive costs of migration to a different platform. This presentation discusses the various versions and high level feature functionality of DB2 9.7 LUW and explains how the Oracle compatibility features of DB2 v9.7 make it easier than ever to migrate from Oracle and other databases to DB2. We will review some of the differences between Oracle's and DB2s architecture, explain how the Oracle Compatibility feature works, the tools and process we use complete the migration.
14:45	Tea/coffee break
15:15	DB2 for SAP	Richard Fisher, IBM	SAP applications depend entirely on the database engine. DB2 is the only database specifically optimised for SAP and this presentation explores what the "Optimised for SAP" slogan really means to your DBAs and managers and hear how DB2 enhanced compatibility simplified SAP upgrades for customers from a wide range of industries.
16:15	Wrap-up & Feedback session
16:30	Close

Date and Time	Details and Link
Available On Demand	Replays of IBM Teleconferences and Webcasts can be found by following this link. The most recent of these sessions were: *DB2 for z/OS Optimizing INSERT Performance* presented by John Campbell *DB2 X for z/OS Technical Preview* presented by Jeff Josten *Hints and tips to get the most out of IBM DB2 9 for z/OS* presented by Namik Hrle *Looking to Upgrade to DB2 9 for z/OS and improve productivity & reduce costs?* presented by Maria McCoy *DB2 10 for z/OS: Helping you improve operational efficiencies and gain competitive advantage* by Roger Miller and David Beulke
October 24th - 28th 2010	*IBM InformationOnDemand* conference was held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Centre in Las Vegas, Nevada in October 2010. See the IOD website for more details.
November 8th - 12th 2010	*2010 IDUG EMEA* was held at the Hilton Vienna Hotel in Vienna, Austria in November 2010. See the IDUG EMEA website for more details.
Jan 25th 2011	*Why is DB2 for z/OS better than Oracle RAC?* was an IBM webcast highlighting the advantages DB2 for z/OS has over Oracle RAC. Click here for more details and to view the recorded session.
Feb 22nd 2011	*Upgrading to DB2 9 or DB2 10 for z/OS — How? When? What is the cost versus benefit?* was a webcast by IBM's Roger Miller providing reasons why you should consider migrating to DB2 9 or DB2 10 for z/OS. Click here for more details and to view the recorded session.
May 2nd - 6th 2011	*2011 IDUG North America* will be held in Anaheim, California in May 2011. See the IDUG NA website for more details.
October 5th - 7th 2011	The *DB2 Symposium* will be held in London in October. See the the symposium website for more details.
November 1st - 2nd 2011	*UK GSE Meeting* will be held at Whittlebury Hall near Towcester in November 2011. See the GSE conference website for more details.