IDUG NA 2026

Organizations running Db2 increasingly face a shortage of experienced administrators while environments grow more complex. This session explores a structured approach to developing new Db2 professionals using guided learning, hands-on labs, and coaching from experienced practitioners. We’ll share lessons learned from building scalable training models that accelerate time-to-productivity for new Db2 administrators.

With fewer schools teaching DB2 for z/OS, it often falls on the DBAs to provide instruction for the programming staff. This is a very basic introduction to DB2 concepts and vocabulary, aimed at the novice user of DB2, or anyone who must train novice users.

Ensuring high availability and resilience is a core requirement for modern enterprise data platforms. In Db2 Data Sharing environments, lock structures are a fundamental component for maintaining system stability and consistent performance under continuous, mission-critical workloads.
At Itaú Unibanco S.A., Db2 for z/OS supports essential banking applications operating 24x7, across transactional and batch workloads in a large-scale production environment. As part of its ongoing resilience and architecture evolution strategy, Itaú adopted the Db2 Lock Structure Asynchronous Duplex capability.
This implementation strengthened the platform’s resilience posture by increasing fault tolerance, enhancing operational continuity during infrastructure maintenance, and reinforcing overall system stability.
In this presentation, specialists from Itaú and IBM share practical insights from the initiative, including architectural motivations, implementation considerations, testing approaches, and results achieved. The discussion highlights how close collaboration between client and vendor supported the successful adoption of advanced Db2 z/OS capabilities in a complex enterprise environment.

The future of enterprise innovation depends on unlocking the full potential of your mainframe data. Today, critical business data is siloed across Db2, IMS, VSAM, and other legacy sources slowing progress and consuming up to 80% of analysts’ time in preparation instead of insight. Traditional ETL and data warehouses can’t keep pace with the demands of real-time analytics, AI, and cloud-native applications.
This session explores how a unified data virtualization layer connects your mainframe data to the digital ecosystem—securely, instantly, and without costly replication. Imagine real-time access to all your enterprise data through RESTful APIs, JDBC, ODBC, and SQL—fueling advanced analytics, machine learning, and next-gen applications.
Join us to explore how your organization can move beyond silos and embrace a future of agility, speed, and innovation. The next era of data-driven transformation starts now—are you ready?

The blessing of SQL is: when logically correct it will return an answer. Unfortunately, this is also the curse. Depending on how you write your SQL, you give the optimizer more or fewer choices .In this session we will go over understanding performance basics and common made SQL mistakes and the impact they have on the optimizer's choices.
Bring our application DBA's and developers to this session to train them and avoid common SQL performance pitfalls

The folks at the Db2 Lab provide us with a great tool to monitor Db2. It's free and already installed with Db2. This session will show you how db2mon works and how to use it. Then, we'll discuss how to run it in different ways for different use cases. Next, we'll present a way to run db2mon for historical data gathering and trend analysis. Finally, we'll show examples of the data db2mon provides and what to look for in various performance scenarios.

Security is often treated as an afterthought—apps launched without proper controls, cloud environments spun up outside organizational standards, third-party vendors granted excessive access to sensitive data. These missteps vary in form, but they all share a common denominator: data. And for attackers, data is the only thing that truly matters.
Regardless of how strong your perimeter defenses are, once an attacker gets inside, your ability to detect and respond quickly becomes critical. That’s where Guardium Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) comes in. DAM helps organizations understand what “normal” looks like—enabling real-time detection of anomalies, suspicious behavior, and potential breaches before serious damage is done.
In this session, we’ll explore how implementing IBM Guardium can reduce risk, improve incident response, and stop data leaks before they happen. Because when everything else can be bypassed, your best defense is knowing your data patterns.
Key scenarios we’ll examine include:- Privilege escalation and misuse- High-volume data extraction- Cross-site scripting (XSS) via database inputs- OS command injection through vulnerable queries- Abuse of privileged accounts- Unauthorized access to restricted or sensitive data- Password spraying and brute-force attempts- Anomalous behavior outside of baseline operations- Change reconciliation failures (e.g., Guard App event correlation)
For each use case, we’ll analyze:- What the attack looks like in terms of raw database activity- How DAM tools can be tuned to detect these patterns- Alerting and response workflows for containment and remediation

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 databases support the High Availability needs of many customers today. Db2 v11.5.5.0 saw the general availability of High Availability with Pacemaker on the Linux platform, providing a newer, Cloud-ready alternative to the TSA implementation. Newer releases have added support for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud environments.This workshop will give you hands-on experience for managing a Db2 HADR with Pacemaker Cluster on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or IBM Cloud. The session will cover the Cloud-specific implementation of Fencing mechanisms and Virtual IP (VIP) addresses across different cloud platforms. Key topics include: Implementation of Route 53 for DNS-based VIP management, Setup of Disk Fencing, Qdevice (Quorum Device) for enhanced split-brain prevention.

In the world of Db2 for z/OS, SQL performance tuning is one of the most critical and often most complex of DBA tasks. While static SQL has long been the standing order for traditional mainframe applications, the growing use of dynamic SQL - driven by modern applications, APIs, and distributed workloads - has changed the tuning game.Dynamic SQL’s agility and flexibility introduces a new layer of complexity that can hinder performance if not well managed and cause inconsistent performance and even be unpredictable. Dynamic SQL is becoming more prevalent as agile development and hybrid workloads become the norm. But with the flexibility of dynamic SQL comes responsibility - DBAs must adapt and develop new ways of monitoring and tuning dynamic workloads in real-time and across the application lifecycle. Colin Oakhill will share a proven approach to bring order to chaos by giving DBAs the visibility, control, and insight they need to ensure that dynamic SQL performs efficiently and predictably. Just like long-time DBAs are used to with static SQL.

This presentation will demonstrate how to find, analyze and tune the top 40 expensive queries. Special emphasis will be on finding the cursors that could benefit from multi-row fetch. In addition, discussions on designing perfect indexes, MQTs and AQTs, along with manual query rewrite, SQL exploitation and most important, proper use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.