IDUG Conference 2022 North America -- 5 Great Themes

After too many virtual meetings, IDUG North American Conference 2022 in Boston was held as the first in person IDUG conference in a long time. First a big thank you and congratulation has to go out to the IDUG volunteers, Board of Directors, the Conference Planning committee, and all their conference vendor sponsors. It was great to see and talk to everyone.

It also was great to see all the vendors and have a chance to talk with them all about the industry, all their existing and new products’ advantages. All these vendors, IBM, Broadcom, BMC, IntelliMagic, LearnQuest, DataAvail, DBI Software, Infotel, ITGain, Log-On Software, Segus Inc, Themis, and XTivia liked seeing the big IDUG crowd come out again.

These are the five themes from the various keynotes, spotlight featured sessions, general attendee conversations, and attendance at the user and vendor sessions.

1. The cloud is being implemented everywhere and in many different configurations. Private, public, hybrid, test and production clouds for every type of situation. From the private production cloud for elastic scaling computing power and storage to the other mix of public and private company oriented clouds for sharing public domain information from all types of companies. Cloud configurations for developers to test and scale their testing from hundreds of rows to billions of rows and for testing transaction rates from tens to thousands of transaction per second. The cloud is the answer but at what cost?
2. Cloud costs are also starting to become a factor along with cloud lock in from the various vendors. Discussions highlighted the advantages and uniqueness of the various implemented cloud solutions but also the customization and big expense, time and personnel considerations for getting it all to work. Comments about the cloud costs stealing budget from other mainframe and UNIX platform budgets was also highlighted. The cloud environments are big margin businesses for all the cloud players such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc. When will the various user companies begin building out their own cloud infrastructures to contain these vendors’ huge profits?
3. Development efficiency continues to be an important huge topic as every new developer wants their tools; GitHub, Docker, Jupyter Notebooks, Jenkins and Ansible or something else. These tools are vital to make all their development connections to their test, QA and production environment to seamlessly work with their in-house or cloud systems, databases and development or existing services. All the vendors and especially IBM are answering the call through their new development offering and connection capabilities. The new containerization through a few clicks from IBM demonstrated during George Baklarz’s session was very effective and showed how easy it really can be configured and executed very quickly.
4. Of course the new functions and features in Db2 Version 13 for z/OS were great sessions. IBM did a great job explaining all the features in the various IBM sessions that went through the details. For those that didn’t get to IDUG the new Db2 Version 13 for z/OS Redbook explains the details and is great for plane reading. Download your copy of IBM Db2 13 for z/OS and More at https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248527.pdf. Also if you haven’t already download the latest Db2 Version 13 for z/OS manuals at: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-for-zos/13?topic=SSEPEK_13.0.0/home/src/tpc/db2z_pdfmanuals.html.
5. Also for the Db2 Version 11.5 for LUW administrators and developers IDUG did an outstanding job with the many sessions, Hands on Labs and Developer Day. The Developer Day was very well attended from the local Boston area college computer science students and some of the local companies. Also a number of the Db2 Version 11.5 for LUW sessions were done highlighting all the new function and features in Db2 Version 11.5 FixPak 6. For some attendees it was great talking about Db2 External Tables. This new feature was discussed and shared through a Jupyter Notebook https://github.com/IBM/db2-jupyter/blob/f2447f42b99073ce34ef3ecde416dc0134b250e6//Db2_11.5_Features/Db2_11.5_External_Tables.ipynb. Also there are a number of new Db2 11.5 notebooks available highlighting the various new JSON Db2 features on GitHub at: https://github.com/IBM/db2-jupyter/find/f2447f42b99073ce34ef3ecde416dc0134b250e6.

These five areas were the themes from my IDUG 2022 Boston conference experience. Get your plans and budgets ready for IDUG in Edinburgh or IDUG North American next year!