IDUG NA 2026

Amazon RDS for Db2 addresses growing demand for Db2 cloud migration by delivering a fully managed service with push-button deployment — provision a production-ready Db2 instance in minutes, not days. Automated patching, backups, scaling, and failover eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting. This deep dive covers RDS for Db2 through the Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. Attendees learn how a managed service reduces admin burden, improves uptime, and frees teams to focus on innovation. Leave with a blueprint for modernizing Db2.
Self-managed Db2 means manual patching, complex HA, and rising costs. Amazon RDS for Db2 fixes that — deploy production-ready Db2 in minutes with a fully managed service.This deep dive covers RDS for Db2 through the Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence (automated patching, backups, monitoring), Security (encryption, IAM, VPC), Reliability (Multi-AZ, cross-region DR), Performance Efficiency (right-sizing, storage tuning), and Cost Optimization (Reserved Instances, TCO savings vs. self-managed).Live demos and customer patterns show how to provision, secure, and optimize RDS for Db2 for production. Migrating from Linux or AIX? Optimizing an existing deployment? Leave with a well-architected blueprint for Db2 as a managed service on AWS.

This session presents a comprehensive approach to database backup and recovery using Snapshot Backup technology integrated with Cloud infrastructure. The solution leverages the Db2 ACS Scripted interface to automate backup operations on Linux systems, enabling efficient data protection strategies for enterprise databases. The implementation utilizes Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of database volumes, ensuring data integrity during backup operations. By combining snapshot-based backup techniques with cloud object storage capabilities, this approach delivers a robust disaster recovery solution that minimizes backup windows, reduces storage costs, and enhances data availability. The scripted automation through Db2 ACS interface ensures consistent, repeatable backup procedures while maintaining operational efficiency in Linux environments. This methodology addresses critical requirements for modern database management, including rapid recovery time objectives (RTO), minimal recovery point objectives (RPO), and compliance with data retention policies through cloud-based archival strategies.

The role of the DBA has evolved over the years. As businesses across the globe embrace digital transformation, and customer expectations increase, the traditional rules of engagement must be reconsidered, and the DBA remains a key lynch-pin in the Agile journey to DevOps. This presentation will review the old rules of engagement, and express the importance of communication, trust, embracing change, and automation tools in modern software development in the age of AI.

In this presentation we will examine in detail the backup and recovery options available to DBAs for their Db2 environments. How to tune these utilities will be discussed and results will be reviewed from numerous tests. We will see what is the “art of the possible” from using local files, COS, Storage based copies, etc. … We will take a close look at the new version enhancements and how they can improve your backup and recovery experience.

Many Db2 environments rely on Tivoli System Automation (TSA) to manage High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) clusters. While TSA has long provided reliable automation for Db2 failover, modern Linux clustering standards and DevOps practices are increasingly shifting organizations toward Pacemaker-based cluster management and infrastructure automation.
This session presents a real-world migration approach for transitioning Db2 HADR environments from TSA to Pacemaker, while leveraging Ansible automation to standardize cluster deployment, configuration, and operational management.
Attendees will learn how to design a repeatable DevOps-driven framework that automates the provisioning of Pacemaker clusters, integrates Db2 HADR resources, and validates failover behavior across environments. The presentation will demonstrate how Ansible playbooks can be used to automate cluster setup, resource configuration, fencing policies, and operational testing, enabling consistent and scalable deployments.
The session will also highlight common challenges encountered during TSA-to-Pacemaker migrations, including cluster configuration pitfalls, resource dependencies, and operational considerations for maintaining availability during the transition.
By the end of the session, participants will gain practical guidance, automation patterns, and lessons learned for modernizing Db2 high-availability environments using Pacemaker and DevOps practices.

Db2 for z/OS continues to advance with new capabilities that simplify development, automation, and operations across the enterprise.
Join this session to explore the latest modernization updates including Db2 auto-discovery of configuration parameters, future exploitation around Configuration as Code, new APIs to support continuous integration and continuous deployment of database schema changes, and IBM Db2 Agents.

Db2 containerization makes Db2 more flexible, scalable, and cloud-native by running it in containers managed by Kubernetes. As Kubernetes is constantly evolving, so does Db2U, our Db2 Universal Container. Come and learn the great deal of innovative work coming your way, in terms of the next-gen capabilities of Db2U.

Db2 professionals manage complex and mission-critical data environments where troubleshooting, performance analysis, and knowledge discovery can be time-consuming. In this session, we explore how GenAI can assist Db2 professionals by helping understand database structures, maintain environments and accelerate problem diagnosis. Through practical examples, we demonstrate how AI can act as a partner, augmenting expertise and helping teams work more efficiently while maintaining the reliability expected from enterprise Db2 systems.

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.

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.

As Transport Layer Security (TLS) becomes mandatory across enterprise environments, Db2 professionals increasingly play a pivotal role in protecting data in transit—both on the client and server sides. While this session briefly reviews core TLS fundamentals such as trust models and server authentication, its primary focus is on mutual (client) certificate authentication for Db2 for z/OS. Attendees will be guided through the complete configuration workflow, including certificate management, RACF keyring setup, AT TLS policies, DDF configuration, and identity mapping for client certificates.

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.

This updated workshop will give you the education and information you need to use existing and new features of Amazon RDS for Db2. Some of the topics covered during this workshop will include provisioning, scaling, backup, monitoring, migration and beyond. Each module will be introduced and presented and then participants will be provided an environment they can use and go through a series of instructor led exercises to practice what they have learned and explore. This will be a joint workship between the IBM and AWS RDS teams.

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.