UK DB2 User Group Minutes, March 2009

Java developers and DBAs often have different objectives and speak different languages - literally and metaphorically. These differences are sometimes highlighted when code performance in complex environments suffers. This presentation will look at how Data Studio Developer (a free download) and pureQuery may be used to improve performance in the short term and promote constructive dialogue between DBAs and those heathen developers in the longer term. With input from customers who have deployed the software.

Tiffany Money has worked with DB2 on LUW for over 10 years, focusing on data management tools in OLTP and warehouse environments. She has worked with many customers in all sectors across Europe, and is a member of the design advisory council for IBM's performance management tooling on LUW. Tiffany is a regular speaker at IBM's Information on Demand conferences.

DB2 9 and V9.5 were billed as bringing us lots of new time and space-saving features, but what was the experience in the real world? Simon will take us through customer experiences with compression, autonomics (particularly memory management) and cubing services for data warehouse - and discusses what DBAs have been doing with all that spare time.

Simon Woodcock has over 20 year's experience in a variety of UK and Europe-wide roles within IBM's Software Group. He currently leads the IBM technical design team for Balanced Warehouse in Europe. He has a strong interest in designing and refining systems that make the life of a DBA more fruitful, more useful and ultimately more satisfying. He is IBM's European point man for complex DB2 issues on the LUW platforms and a leading member of the global DB2 warehouse design team, with a special interest in autonomics.

XML is the lifeblood of e-business. And DB2 pureXML makes producing and consuming XML easier, and also gives excellent performance.

This presentation gives an introduction to pureXML and then discusses it's use in B2B processing for two different industries, showing how there is a great deal of commonality between them.

Philip Nelson has worked in IT since 1987, with DB2 for z/OS since 1989 and distributed DB2 since 1995. He has been involved in DB2 user groups, both local and international, for many years. He has presented at IDUG yearly since 1997 and is currently editor of the IDUG Solutions Journal. His areas of expertise including performance monitoring and tuning, database design and admin and using DB2 with new technologies. In October 2008 he made his debut at the IBM Information on Demand conference and is happy to share the presentation from this with the UK group.

There are limits to how quickly any traditional, disk based, RDBMS can access data. If your workload needs to smash the limits of these traditional RDBMS then you could use an in-memory RDBMS, but if you can't afford many Terabytes of main memory, then you might consider using an in-memory database with a traditional disk based RDBMS to maximise performance at a realistic cost.

This presentation describes such a system with notes on the joys, the tears and the plaudits that litter the path to getting unbelievable (that means good) performance.

Now nearing the zenith of a long and distinguished career with Racal, Informix and IBM, John has always been connected with databases and always interested in extensibility. As a result John has lived on the leading edge of the rise of the relational database, experiencing a series of near-life experiences with spatial databases, time series and most recently some serious delving into XML. He also has over 20 years experience of the more mundane stuff as well in a variety of technical roles in the UK and at European level.