We had an excellent conference in Brussels last month. The venue for the conference, The Crowne Plaza Brussels – Le Palace, was an excellent host. In my introductory speech, I mentioned the Data Tech Summit that IDUG will be holding during the IDUG DB2 Tech Conference in Anaheim, California next May. This event will offer topics that appeal to those with an architectural interest, including Spark, Big SQL, data lakes and applying machine learning. More details about this event will be shared in the next couple of months.
The conference event began with a keynote “Reboot your Thinking” by Paul Sloane. The presentation was very enlightening and I learned that I cannot draw a pig, a cat or a mouse, but I did realize that I need to look at the world quite differently and I need to use more lateral thinking. I hope to be able to apply that not only to my work life, but also to my personal life.
Namik’s keynote, “IBM Database Management Systems: Trends and Directions” really helped me understand where IBM is headed with DB2. His explanation of eventual consistency using Amazon as an example will stick with me for a long time.
I had the opportunity to attend a number of excellent technical sessions and talk to a number of fellow DB2 professionals, many that I had not talked to since the last IDUG conference. Matt Huras and Melanie Stopfer are two of my favorite presenters, as I have a bit of a DB2 for LUW bias these days, and I got to listen to both of them at the conference. Thanks to the two of them, I have some great material as I am planning migrations to DB2 for LUW 11.1. Their presentations will save me many hours of research.
I appreciated the vendor events at the conference that were hosted by Triton / DBI, CA and IBM. A big thank you to the vendors who hosted these events where IDUG attendees got to socialize with each other. I also enjoyed visiting a number of vendors in the Expo Hall.
I hope to see many of my IDUG friends at the next IDUG conference in Anaheim.