25th meeting of German Db2 User Group

Celebrating the 25th DeDUG meeting

Last Friday, the 25th meeting of the German Db2 User Group was held, this time hosted by Fiducia & GAD IT AG in Karlsruhe. As usual, it was both a great networking and informative event. I had the opportunity to catch up with many Db2 users - customers, partner and IBMers. Moreover, similar to a couple of previous meetings, I had the after-lunch talk, this time featuring Db2 on Cloud security topics.

Customer and Db2 Insights

What I always find great about user group meetings, regardless whether it is an international IDUG conference or a local meetup, is to learn about Db2 in customer environments. There are so many different use cases, database and server sizes, speeds and feeds as well as different approaches how customers tackle the daily IT (and organizational) challenges.

In the first talk From Index Surprise to Index Advise, Marcel Scheibe discussed how he as development DBA optimizes  SQL statements by finding the right mix of indexes. He utilizes one of the common Db2 tools, the Db2 design advisor (db2advis). It produces suggestions for design improvements which then can and should be evaluated.

Next up, Marc Schneider showed the versatility of the ADMINTABINFO view and the related ADMIN_GET_TAB_INFO table function. They can be used to retrieve all kinds of metadata and status information of database tables. Thus, the output can be used to determine whether LOADs have been successful, indexes need to be reorganized, the table has the expected object sizes and much more. His recommendation is to retrieve the data and directly store it in a status table or admin database for reuse.


My talk after lunch covered how to control your encryption keys for Db2 on Cloud, my endeavor to connect to Db2 authenticating with an API key or access token, and a quick report on my tests of combining the SQL Query service with Db2.

As usual, the Db2 meeting had several short (lightning) talks, lively discussions during the presentations and breaks, and great networking with old and new friends. Want to join us for the next DeDUG meeting? It will be on April 3rd in Munich.

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