So, IDUG 2005 is finally over. Its been quite a week. Nearly 1300 people made the trip to Denver to take advantage of IDUG's unrivalled technical education and networking opportunities.

This year's event had even more of a buzz about it than usual. For the first time, the programme included three Informix threads as a result of a collaboration with the International Informix User Group (IIUG). Speaking to both DB2 and Informix attendees throughout the week, it was good to hear that both groups seemed to be getting lots of value from this new development. Many DBAs today are being asked to manage multiple databases, and quite a few attendees have been taking the opportunity to improve their knowledge of both DB2 and Informix at the conference. At the closing session today, it was announced that this collaboration would be continued for next year's IDUG North American conference in Tampa, Florida.

I was also amazed to hear that over 700 IBM technical certifications were awarded during the conference. The ability to take free certification tests is a great extra benefit for conference attendees, and IBM's continued to investment in the certification programme means that its now starting to be regarded as an essential item for most DBAs and other DB2 professionals - its certainly a must for independent consultants such as me.

So, that's it. As usual, its been a fantastic experience - I've had the opportunity to catch up with a lot of very good friends from IBM and IDUG, and make a few new ones too. The dates for next year's conference in Tampa are already in my diary, but first we have the European conference in Berlin to look forward to in October.  In the meantime, I hope I managed to give to just a small flavour of this year's North American conference.

The temperature may have dropped 10 degrees outside, but here in the Denver Convention Centre there's still plenty of hot stuff going on. Even though we're half-way through the event, the general level of buzz and energy here hasn't diminished. I've been attending IDUG conferences for the past ten years now - the cities and the themes change from year to year, but one thing remains constant: the people. And IDUG people are a pretty special bunch.

The attendees are some of the most passionate, dedicated IT professionals you will ever come across. Many of them not only have deep knowledge of DB2, but an innate enthusiasm for their craft that is incredibly infectious. With the main conference lasting close to four very full days (five if you include the full-day education seminars that were held on Sunday) believe me you have to be pretty committed to stay the course. But the formal technical training is only half the story here - most of the attendees I talk to agree that the networking opportunities are every bit as valuable. Whether its a quick conversation over a coffee break or a longer session over several beers in one of IDUG's legendary vendor "customer appreciation events", the ability to swap experiences with hundreds of your DB2 peers is amazingly valuable.

Then of course there are the IDUG speakers. There is a huge variety of nationalities, backgrounds and levels of previous speaking experience on the grid, but every one of them has put a significant amount of effort (and usually a whole truckload of nervous energy) into delivering a presentation that will allow others to learn and benefit from their experiences. From IBM developers and professional consultants to first-time user speakers, they are one of IDUG's greatest assets.

Finally, there is the IDUG volunteer community. IDUG's very existence depends upon a small army of people who willingly give up large chunks of their own time to help run the organisation. Members of the Conference Planning Committees work all year round to put together the technical programmes for each conference, and help organise the million-and-one details that are so important in making a conference of this size run so smoothly. The Board Directors (of which I am one) put in similar amounts of time to set the strategic direction of the organisation and ensure that we continue to deliver on our mission of delivering high quality DB2 education to DB2 users all over the world. There is also a huge number of volunteers who serve IDUG in many other capacities, from helping to administer the various Listserv discussion groups to co-ordinating the activities of local DB2 user groups worldwide. These folks are the engine that powers IDUG's success, and I am constantly in awe of their enthusiasm, dedication, professionalism and capacity for alcohol while still making it back to the conference on time the following morning!

Listening to many of the great technical sessions here at IDUG over the past couple of days has got me thinking about just how far DB2 has come since I first started working with V1.2 some 17 years ago. Back then, the whole relational thing was pretty new as far as the mainframe world was concerned, and radical though the technology was there was obviously a whole lot of work still needed before DB2 would be able to support prime-time OLTP workloads. An unbelievable amount of new function has been shipped since then: packages, referential integrity, object relational, stored procedures, data sharing - the list just goes on and on. The advent of DB2 for z/OS V8 last year heralded yet another huge chunk of new stuff for us all to learn, understand and assimilate into our shops.

So, with V8 has IBM finally finished with DB2? Is their job done? Don't bet on it. Although many of the people I have spoken to here at IDUG this week are still stuggling to get the machine slots or the staff time to get V8 fully implemented, IBM have already started hinting about what they are working on next. I've had some interesting conversations with people who fear that IBM may be falling into the Microsoft trap of endlessly adding features that very few people will ever use, but that's not the impression I'm left with when talking to my customers. They are still struggling to "do more with less" when it comes to DBA and development resource. Ever more demanding applications are shrinking their ability to tolerate planned or unplanned data outages. XML is becoming an increasingly important as the "lingua franca" of the business world, and they need better ways of storing and managing it seamlessly with their more traditional data.

Of course, none of these problems are new, and IBM has made great strides in addressing them in V7 and V8. But there is lots more work to do, and its really encouraging to see that IBM continues to make the effort to really understand the problems their customers are facing so they can focus their developemt efforts (and of course the interaction and feedback that the IBM developers get at IDUG play a key part in this). I'm betting that the next release of DB2 for z/OS will once again have us all scramblng to take advantage of another great set of new features that will deliver direct business benefits to our organisations, and by that time there will probably be a whole new class of information management challenges emerging that the IBM developers can get stuck into.

Whatever the future may hold for DB2, one thing is for sure: there's plenty of life in the old dog yet, and IDUG will continue to play a key role in educating us on when and how to make use of the latest innovations from the IBM labs.

Well, it's Monday morning and I'm, pleased to say that the jetlag is finally starting to subside. Denver is a great location for a conference - the brand-new conference centre is superb, and situated right in the centre of the city within walking distance of all the major hotels and shops. The weather here is equally amazing - despite the "mile high" location its been hovering around 30 degrees celsius since I arrived on Saturday night.

After a full day yesterday spent planning strategy with my fellow IDUG Board members, the conference itself kicked off this morning with a great keynote from Janet Perna, the General Manager of IBM's Information Management Solutions group. Janet and her co-presenters gave a comprehensive overview of the state of the IBM Information Management business in 2005. IBM's Information On Demand initiatiative continues to gather pace, with more and more self-managing, self-optimising features being built into DB2 and its sister products.

This raises some interesting issues for the DBA community: with IBM determined to reduce the TCO for their products and make DB2 better able to  manage itself, where does that leave the highly skilled career DBA? I've discussed this topic with many concerned DBAs over the past couple of years, but this is the first time I've heard Janet address the issue directly.  Her view (and its one that I share) is that DBAs need to "move up the food chain" and transfrom themselves from database administrators to Information Analysts and Information Architects. By being freed of the day-to-day drudgery of routine housekeeping activities, DBAs can use their years of hard-won experience to deliver direct business benefit to their organisations by supporting an entire "Information Architecture".  We all like to operate in environments that we're familiar with, but technology moves on and a lot of DBAs will have to step out of that comfort zone over the coming years.

That's all for now. I'll try to post again later today, after I've had the opportunity to attend a few more the the technical sessions and wander around the extensive vendor Exhibit Hall.

"What on Earth is a blog?". These were the words that greeted me when I excitedly told my wife that I'd be recording my thoughts and experiences at this year's premier DB2 educational event within the hallowed pages of dbazine. After a quick explanation, her second question proved to be more difficult to answer: "Where are you going to get the time to do that?".

She has a point. With over 200 technical sessions spread out over five days, its going to be a challenge to even find time to eat and sleep. Oh, and did I mention that I'm also a member of the IDUG Board of Directors as well? That means even more meetings to try and pack into the schedule...

Early tomorrow morning, I'll be flying from the UK to Denver for IDUG 2005 - North America. Over the next week, I'll be doing my level best to give you just a small flavour of the sights, sounds and general buzz from conference. Maybe you've never had the opportunity to go to an IDUG conference, or maybe you're a regular attendee that had to miss out this year to allow one of your colleagues to go in your place. Whatever your previous IDUG experience, I hope you'll find this, my first blog, interesting and informative.

Now, where did I put that passport...