IDUG EMEA 2026
Workshops & Hands-On Labs

Presented by Toine Michielse, Michal Bialecki, Julia Carter, Emil Kotrc, and 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.

Artificial intelligence is transforming how database administrators manage and optimize enterprise data platforms. By integrating AI capabilities directly into Db2 for z/OS, organizations can streamline operations, gain faster insights, and reduce the time required to diagnose and resolve complex database issues.

Experience the enhanced and smarter solution built on top of IBM Db2 AI for z/OS. It provides a unified intelligent workspace that acts as a force multiplier for every DBA, enabling intelligent and automated database administration and accelerating troubleshooting. This helps application and AI initiatives move faster.

With these enhanced capabilities, you will learn how to perform core DBA tasks such as catalog navigation, SQL tuning, and troubleshooting issues like deadlocks, timeouts, and lock escalations. You will also explore object management, Db2 health checks, and the AI agent that translates complex issues into simple, understandable explanations.

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.

This workshop will give you the education and information you need to to master building applications with a serverless database. In this workshop you learn how to use serverless capabilities in Db2 to go from prompt to production.  You will learn about the power capabilities that Db2 provides and get to experience this yourself as you work through real world and customizable scenarios.  If you want to supercharge your Db2 skills for the future this is the workshop to join.

Presented by Denis Tronin, James Endler, Michal Bialecki, and Sergei Osadchuk
Hands-on Lab – 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.

Join us for an exciting workshop to learn how you can benefit from the latest capabilities to boost your Db2 for z/OS user experience. During this workshop, we will present the overall architecture and showcase the recent features designed to transform the experience of  database administrators and application developers.

The workshop attendees will have opportunity to interact with the presenters to simulate their daily tasks and test drive the solution.  For example:

• Db2 administrator personas, will experience a very intuitive way to tuning queries, catalog navigation, capture SQLs from different sources, stabilize and free SQLs, etc…  
• Db2 application developer personas, will experience how they can meet the fast-paced demands of today’s businesses by developing, testing and deploying applications, including stored procedures, via the most popular development tool integrated with Db2 for z/OS.

Become a Db2 Pacemaker Expert in Just 4 Hours — Across All Major Clouds and learn how Db2 supports 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 - 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.

As cyber threats against critical infrastructure grow in sophistication and frequency, organizations running mission-critical workloads on IBM Z require more than perimeter defences — they need proven, platform-native strategies to detect, contain, and recover from successful attacks with minimal business disruption.

The IBM Z Cyber Vault workshop brings together IBM technical specialists, product experts, and early adopter customers to explore the full spectrum of cyber resilience on the IBM Z platform. This focused session series covers architecture, tooling, and real-world experience across four core topics. In this workshop, we’ll provide a comprehensive introduction to the IBM Z Cyber Vault architecture. Attendees will gain a clear understanding of how an isolated recovery environment (IRE) is constructed, how data is protected through air-gap principles and immutable copies, and how Cyber Vault serves as the cornerstone of a mainframe cyber resilience strategy. 

Standard Text-to-SQL tools fail when they hit the complexity of enterprise Db2 schemas. This hands-on session demonstrates how to transition from basic prompting to Agentic AI - creating an autonomous "Query Guard" that reasons, acts, and fixes its own mistakes.We will build an agent capable of navigating the Db2 lifecycle independently.You will learn to architect a Agent that doesn't just error out, but proactively traps SQLCODEs, autonomously queries the Db2 Catalog to resolve schema mismatches, and refactors its own SQL on the fly. Attendees will leave with a functional blueprint for an agent that transforms Db2 from a passive subsystem into a resilient, self-healing partner. 

SQL performance tuning is a core DBA skill, yet many efforts remain reactive and inconsistent. This session presents a practical, end-to-end tuning workflow for Db2 for z/OS from identifying problem SQL to validating improvements. Attendees will walk through real tuning decisions using metrics, access path analysis, and supporting tools to achieve measurable performance gains.

Experience the new features of SQL Data Insights Pro, including unstructured text support, model training offloading to IDAA, and incremental retraining. SQL Data Insights Pro combines unsupervised deep learning with traditional SQL queries, allowing you to run similarity, dissimilarity, clustering, analogy, and commonality AI queries on your Db2 for z/OS data.
In this hands-on lab, learn how to train models using both structured and unstructured data to gain deeper insights from your enterprise data. With the new option to run model training on IDAA, you gain greater flexibility while saving valuable system resources. You will also learn how incremental retraining can save time and resources when updating models with new data.
With these capabilities, you can uncover hidden relationships across tables and views in your Db2 data, quickly gain actionable insights to address business problems as they arise, and confidently make better business decisions.

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.