IDUG NA 2026

In this session we'll take a look at the capabilities that have been added to Db2 over the past years to prepare Db2 to meet client demands of today and the future. This will include modern deployment options such as cloud and containerized deployments - but - we'll spend more time on modern workloads such as data virtualization, multi-model support, NoSQL support, how to handle mixed workloads and, of course, AI. Many clients are using Db2 for traditional OLTP, operational and analytic workloads - but - are you getting the full value of your Db2 investment and footprint ? All these high value capabilities are there and included in your current license base. Lets unpack what they are.

Enterprises are under pressure to deliver faster insights, streamline operations, and reduce the complexity of managing large Db2 environments. Generative AI is emerging as a practical accelerator across development, administration, and performance engineering. This session will show how teams can harness AI to translate natural language questions into accurate Db2 queries, explore schemas and dependencies without digging through documentation, and diagnose performance issues with recommendations that mirror seasoned experts. We will walk through real use cases that demonstrate how GenAI can simplify workloads, cut troubleshooting time, and improve SQL efficiency, giving developers, DBAs, and performance analysts a powerful new set of tools to boost productivity and unlock the full value of Db2.

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.

Db2 Z and the CIA is a powerful informational combination. To be clear, the CIA is the Compliance Information Analysis product available for free to many users of Db2 Z (if you have Broadcom products). Broadcom introduced the CIA as a subproduct of ACF2. It is now an independent product available to most users of their products. The CIA provides a series of Db2 tables that can contain all the information from your external-security-manager (ESM), whether it is ACF2, RACF, or TopSecret. Once your ESM is loaded into the CIA, it is relatively more accessible to the curious end-user! SQL SELECT can be used to easily build interesting and useful and focused reports about your security configuration. This presentation will go over the basics of mainframe security and the basics of the CIA and how to build and populate. Finally, interesting CIA tables and views (and sample SELECTs) will be highlighted to show why it is useful.

Most IT experts know the catchphrase “Never change a running system” very well, especially once you experience that a small change can have a significant impact. Anyway, “The only constant is change” is very true as well. Even if we don’t touch an application for enhancements, we’ll face security updates, software updates, hardware updates, configuration changes and data growth.
Before moving to a new machine, applying (Db2) APARs, changing schema, or SQL, it’s common to test in a sand-box, or development system – very good, but here come the challenges:
1st There are quite a few regulations that affect reliable testing of changes and they all have one in common – DON’T USE PRODUCTION DATA!!!
2nd Without real data, or with data masked and sanitized, we’ll very likely see different results than running one and the same query in production.
This session explains how you can reliably, and resource-friendly, simulate your entire production environment, WITHOUT production data and even on a different machine.
We’ll cover prescreening changes in the following areas:

environment changes, like upgrading to a new machine, or adding more resources
application changes, like SQL queries and schema
data changes, like amount and distribution

The capabilities introduce a whole new world of "what if" opportunities and especially protect you from testing that doesn’t focus on what counts: the resulting performance in your production environment.

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.

This session explores a practical strategy for protecting mainframe data from ransomware by combining prevention, immutable backup design, and automated recovery. While strong identity controls and privileged-access protection remain the first line of defense, organizations also need resilient recovery options when logical corruption or credential-based attacks succeed. The presentation examines the strengths and limits of software-based and hardware-enabled immutable copies, including snapshots, safeguarded copies, and cyber vault architectures, and explains why backup frequency alone does not eliminate the risk of recovering corrupted data. It then addresses the critical recovery questions every enterprise must answer: when corruption began, which recovery point is trustworthy, and how to restore business-critical data without sacrificing post-backup transactions. The session concludes with an approach that pairs immutable storage for backups and transaction logs with automated forward recovery for Db2, IMS, and VSAM, helping organizations reduce data loss, strengthen cyber resilience, and align with growing regulatory expectations for isolated, restorable backups under frameworks such as DORA and industry guidance on resilient recovery.

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.

In this presentation we will discuss the resiliency offerings for DB2 and how they can be combined to provide an Always On architecture.  What are the process changes required, how to I determine what needs to be done and what can I do today. The IBM Always On architecture allows you to run your client facings systems 24 by 7 by 365 with zero downtime.

Db2 delivers a wide range of tools for problem determination. Those tools range from the new Log Analysis Capability in IBM Db2 Genius Hub to classical tools that can and should be used for deeper analysis. As the Db2 community constantly welcomes new database administrators and application developers, an effecient tooling and its use is required for those new community mambers. The session will share tools and best practices for the first occurrence data capture (FODC) tools available for DBAs and developers. This session will cover the first steps in the process of problem determination and problem source identification (PD/PSI). It provides hands-on and practical examples for the strategy and process to encircle and find problems by asking the right questions.

4 hours Hands-on-lab workshop (BYOD - Bring Your Own Device)
Transition from legacy "green screen" interfaces to a modern, high-performance environment using Visual Studio Code. This workshop provides a deep dive into Zowe Explorer and the Code4z extension pack, streamlining both system and database management. You will learn to handle z/OS core tasks - including dataset and USS file operations, job submission, and CLI terminal commands - alongside essential Db2 DBA tasks like schema management and SQL execution. We will also cover best practices for managing VS Code setups and profiles to ensure your workflow is optimized for daily enterprise use. Master these modern tools to simplify and accelerate your Db2 operations.

IBM Db2 offers a wide range of AI features, both built-in and external tools, for creating AI systems and solutions. These include over 200 built-in AI stored procedures and tools that work seamlessly with open-source AI ecosystems. In this workshop, participants will explore Db2’s AI support and use a selection of these features to implement practical AI models. The workshop consists of two parts. In the first module, participants will learn how to develop a supervised AI model using Db2’s built-in AI stored procedures. The entire model development and usage will be done using SQL within the database. In the second module, participants will learn how to create a Python model using popular Python packages outside of the database, and then deploy that model back into a Db2 database. By the end of the workshop, participants will have gained fundamental skills and hands-on experience in utilizing these AI capabilities. They will be able to apply these skills to their future AI projects. This workshop is designed to be beginner-friendly and does not require participants to have extensive knowledge in AI. Basic SQL skills and some Python programming skills are sufficient for attending and benefiting from this workshop.

In this hands-on lab, you'll explore advanced AI capabilities for relational data, including support for unstructured text, offloaded model training, and incremental model retraining. By combining unsupervised deep learning with traditional SQL queries, you'll learn how to perform similarity, dissimilarity, clustering, analogy, and commonality analysis directly on your Db2 for z/OS data.
Through practical exercises, you'll discover hidden relationships across tables and views, uncover actionable insights from enterprise data, and use AI-powered SQL queries to address real-world business challenges. You'll see how these techniques can be applied across industry-specific use cases to identify similar records, segment customers, detect outliers, and make more informed, data-driven decisions.
Make sure to bring your own device.

Efficient data extraction is critical for analytics, migrations, and modern application integration. Optim High Performance Unload (HPU) provides a powerful, flexible, and lightning-fast way to unload Db2 data without impacting production workloads. This session will explore how HPU can be used for faster unloading and migrating data by using direct access methods to deliver unmatched performance compared to traditional unload utilities. In addition, we will demonstrate how HPU can recover data directly from backup images in the event of table loss, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime. Attendees will learn best practices for optimizing unload tasks, and handling large-scale migrations to cloud or hybrid environments. Real-world case studies will highlight performance gains, reduced disk space consumption, and simplified operations. Whether you are a DBA, or architect, this session will equip you with practical strategies to maximize the value of HPU in your enterprise.

Even well‑written SQL can slow Db2 for z/OS when subtle mistakes slip through. In this hands‑on lab, attendees will work with preloaded queries that showcase common pitfalls—over‑indexing, missing or stale statistics, inefficient joins, unnecessary sorting, and predicate mismatches. You’ll identify the issues, apply targeted fixes, and validate improvements using metrics, access path analysis, and supporting tools.
Beyond immediate speedups, this lab reinforces a repeatable diagnostic approach that strengthens day‑to‑day tuning and sets the stage for AI‑assisted operations—where consistent, high‑quality data enables smarter automation and more reliable outcomes.

This 4 hours workshop - knowledge transfer session will be conducted by following presenters: Toine Michielse, Michal Bialecki, Emil Kotrc, Denis Tronin
In the world of Db2 for z/OS, "set it and forget it" is a recipe for performance degradation and wasted storage. As data volumes explode and batch windows shrink, traditional housekeeping—REORG, RUNSTATS, and IMAGE COPY—must evolve from manual chores into a streamlined, automated strategy.
This deep-dive workshop provides a comprehensive blueprint for modern Db2 maintenance. We will move past the basics to explore how to balance object availability with optimal performance. Attendees will learn how to leverage the latest utility enhancements to reduce CPU consumption, manage multi-terabyte objects, and ensure that the optimizer always has the "ground truth" through intelligent statistics collection.

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.

This hands-on lab will explore how Db2 integrates vector data with structured relational data to support AI-driven use cases. Through guided exercises, attendees will combine unstructured text-derived vectors with traditional data and apply similarity search across both. The lab shows queries that merge SQL filtering with vector similarity to enable semantic search, recommendations, and intelligent data retrieval.