IDUG NA 2026

Discover how AI coding assistants transform DB2 development. This live demonstration showcases Bob, an AI-powered tool that automates schema design, generates optimized SQL queries, debugs complex issues, and tunes performance—all through natural language. See real-time examples of migration planning, query optimization, and troubleshooting that reduce development time by 60%. Learn practical integration strategies for your DB2 workflows.

When a Db2 or IMS issue occurs, resolution often relies on time-critical manual analysis. This session explores how agentic AI is evolving the operational model for IMS and Db2—moving beyond scripted automation toward more adaptive, AI-assisted approaches for handling complex runtime scenarios. Through a live demo grounded in real client feedback from a large financial services organization, we demonstrate how these approaches can reduce time to resolution and improve operational efficiency. We also examine how AI-assisted decisioning can support routine maintenance, ensuring actions are recommended within defined rules, governance boundaries, and measurable value.
Co-presented with Anshul Agrawal, this technically focused session will also be submitted to IBM TechXchange.

In this session, we will introduce a z/OS middleware configuration tool (zconfig), which is an automation tool that in a very intuitive way, will help you to discover the configuration parameters of any of your Db2 subsystems. Additionally, you will be able to provision new Db2 subsystems with a configuration like the one just discovered.
Bringing configuration-as-code and automation to Db2 for z/OS environments modernize how to perform operational processes towards your Db2 subsystem management.
Join this session to learn practical approaches to modernizing your Db2 subsystem management.

I have a passion for all things mainframe especially Db2 for z/OS.
I like to tell non-technical folks what I do is make the mainframe & its databases a little easier to work with—and maybe a little less intimidating for the next generation of users.”
“honestly—when people hear ‘mainframe,’ they don’t always think modern, developer-friendly, and easy to integrate with.
But that’s exactly what we’re going to challenge today.”
“What I’m hoping to show you is that modernization isn’t about replacing the mainframe—it’s about unlocking more value from it, making it easier to use, and integrating it seamlessly into how we already build and deliver applications today.”
“So whether you’re deeply familiar with the platform, or just curious about how it fits into a modern development lifecycle—there should be something useful here for you.”

IBM System Z and Db2 for z/OS applications are essential to the successful operations and business workflows for major companies. Join our discussion on OpenTelemetry and its powerful impact on observability across your entire business environment. Whether you're a System Reliability Engineer or an Application Developer, this session is for you!Here's what you'll learn:

An overview of the OpenTelemetry observability framework and how it helps generate, process, and distribute telemetry data.
How Db2 for z/OS supports OpenTelemetry and how you can leverage it for your applications.
How OpenTelemetry support aligns with the broader platform, i.e. IBM System Z and Db2 for z/OS, to enhance your operations.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to enhance your understanding and implementation of OpenTelemetry within Db2 for z/OS and its futures.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to enhance your understanding and implementation of OpenTelemetry within Db2 for z/OS and its futures.

AI agents are moving beyond chatbots and code suggestions. The next frontier is agentic AI — systems that autonomously plan multi-step tasks, invoke tools, handle branching logic, and execute end-to-end workflows with minimal human intervention. This session shows how that capability applies directly to Db2 for z/OS operations today, using tooling already available in your environment.
The architectural foundation is simpler than it appears: a well-documented CLI is already an agent interface. The Zowe CLI ecosystem — including its Db2 plugin and the richer vendor-supplied extensions published to the Zowe conformance catalog — gives an AI agent a complete, auditable means to act on the mainframe. The agent does not wait for step-by-step instructions; it reasons over the task, selects the right tool from its available plugin set, chains the necessary operations, and executes.
This session presents a layered agent architecture purpose-built for Db2 workflows in production environments:
Execution layer: A base skill encoding the Zowe CLI interface — translating agent intent into exact, logged commands with safe defaults enforcedDomain layer: A Db2-specific reasoning layer encoding your object model, naming conventions, environment topology, and operational runbooks — the institutional knowledge that typically lives in a senior DBA's headGuardrail layer: Explicit constraints on what the agent executes autonomously versus what requires human sign-off, scoped by environment, subsystem, or operation classWe will demonstrate this using vendor-supplied database management plugins available in the Zowe ecosystem. By exposing operations like DDL generation, schema comparison across subsystems, validation, deployment, and object migration through a CLI interface, an agent can autonomously execute workflows that previously required manual expert coordination — generating DDL for a target object, comparing it against a reference subsystem, validating dependencies, and staging the deployment artifact as a single orchestrated task.
We will also show how the compounding architecture scales across your full mainframe stack. Institutional knowledge encoded once — for Db2, for your SCM tool, for your CICS or MQ environment — becomes a reusable agent capability. Each domain layer builds on the same execution foundation, and the agent chains them together as the workflow demands.
Attendees will leave with a concrete architecture for deploying agentic AI on Db2 z/OS, practical guardrail patterns that make autonomous execution safe in production, and a clear understanding of how the depth of the Zowe plugin ecosystem — open-source and vendor-supplied alike — becomes a direct multiplier for what an AI agent can accomplish.

Are you ready to move beyond managing infrastructure and start innovating with your data? This hands-on workshop provides a deep dive into migrating and modernizing IBM Db2 workloads using Amazon RDS for Db2. Participants will gain practical experience in executing seamless migrations from platforms like Linux, AIX, or z/OS while ensuring high availability and optimized performance.Beyond the migration, you will explore how to unlock the value of your data by integrating AWS AI/ML services. You'll learn to build intelligent applications using Amazon Bedrock powered by your live RDS for Db2 data. By the end of this session, you will have a clear blueprint for transforming your legacy databases into a modern, AI-ready data foundation.