SHARE is 50 Years Old
This year (2005) marks the 50th anniversary of the SHARE (http://www.share.org) technical conference – and the conference still exhibits a high-level of quality education for IT professionals, particularly IT professionals who work with IBM systems. As rapidly as the computer industry changes, 50 years for a technology conference is almost unbelievable. But SHARE has thrived where others have failed due to its adaptability.
The SHARE conference is actually a group of five co-located events covering diverse topics including application development and integration, enterprise systems management, enterprise IT management, and Unix systems technologies, as well as the traditional focus of SHARE on IBM mainframe topics. With such diverse coverage there is something for just about everyone at a SHARE event.
The Anaheim conference featured over 700 hours of technical training and education, more than 40 hands-on labs, more than 80 vendors exhibiting their wares in the expo, and great opportunities to network with your peers. As a database professional (I assume as much because you are reading my blog), SHARE offers a wealth of training opportunities for DB2 and IMS, as well as related database administration and management topics. Popular speakers from IBM, ISVs, and user organizations bring a wide spectrum of coverage to the event.
[On a personal note I am a long-time presenter at SHARE (no, not 50 years, I assure you). This week I gave two presentations - one on DB2 performance management and another on DB2 database design. I hope to continue presenting at SHARE on a regular basis.]
And the wide range of topics allow attendees to focus on their main area of interest, while being able to augment their knowledge by attending other sessions throughout the week. As a DB2 or IMS DBA you’ll surely want to attend many of the core IMS and DB2 topics, but you might also want to attend sessions on complementary technologies such as CICS, WebSphere, MQSeries, or trend issues like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, web services, and open source. There are even sessions on the mainframe version of Oracle 10g – a topic that is not even dealt with very well at a show like Oracle World. And if all you want to do is attend sessions on your core DBMS there were over 30 DB2 sessions and more than 25 IMS sessions held this week in Anaheim. All of this helps to make SHARE a unique training opportunity for some topics you might not otherwise have access to.
But don't fret if you missed SHARE this week. The SHARE user event is held twice annually with the next meeting scheduled for August 21-26, 2005 in Boston. And the 50th anniversary celebration will continue at that event. As the good folks at SHARE are fond of saying SHARE is not an acronym, it is what they do. And they do it well. Think about adding it to the educational program for your DBA group.
