IDUG EMEA 2026

This presentation will provide the ongoing success story Db2 z/OS Version 13 and covers the latest experiences with Db2 13 at Commerzbank AG. It will talk about some key important areas which are essential for the success and how to prevent some known avoidable pitfalls. We share the important latest experiences of the last 12 months, explains the upcoming and validated best practices in several key areas. This session will also dive into Function Level dependencies, maintenance aspects, some tooling dependencies, and some performance aspects as well as base utilities and system functionalities.

In 2025, NatWest undertook a comprehensive reassessment of its Db2 recovery strategy to align with evolving banking regulations and to take advantage of modern platform capabilities. This review aimed to uncover limitations in existing processes, improve operational performance, and strengthen compliance.
As part of this effort, the bank evaluated Db2 utility features and automation tools that could streamline recovery activities, enforce consistent best‑practice standards, and reduce the need for continual manual tuning of utility options. Future resilience was also a priority, with the strategy designed to support NatWest’s planned adoption of Cyber Vault technology.
This session explores the challenges encountered throughout the transformation, the solutions implemented to overcome them, and the best practices that emerged—highlighting how NatWest is modernising its Db2 recovery landscape while preparing for the future.

To the average application, a database is often treated as a "black box": SQL goes in, and data comes out. But for those tasked with maintaining high-performance systems, "it just works" isn't enough. When a query hangs or a system spikes in CPU, understanding the mechanics "under the hood" is the difference between a quick fix and hours of guesswork.

This presentation takes you on a chronological journey of a query’s lifecycle. We will trace the path of a single PreparedStatement from the moment it leaves a remote application, through the DRDA protocol, and deep into the Db2 engine layers. We will explore:
- The Handshake: How client-server interactions and the SQLDA manage data exchange.
- The Brain: Inside the Query Compiler and Optimizer—how your SQL is transformed into an executable "Plan."
- The Engine Room: How the Runtime components interact with the Buffer Pools, Prefetchers, and Logger to retrieve your data.
- The Return: The mechanics of the ResultSet and how data is effic

Db2 pureScale environments are designed for high availability and scalability, but their behavior under load, failure, and recovery is often more nuanced than expected.
In this interactive session, we’ll challenge your understanding of pureScale through a series of real-world scenarios covering cluster services behavior and failure handling, locking, caching, and recovery. You’ll be asked to predict outcomes, diagnose issues, and uncover what really happens under the covers.
Whether you’re an experienced practitioner or relatively new to pureScale, this session will expose common misconceptions, highlight subtle behaviors, and deepen your intuition about how the system operates in production.
Come ready to participate, question what you think you know—and leave with insights you can apply immediately.

Db2 Distributed Data Facility (DDF) is the gateway to delivering business enterprise data in our modern world of cloud computing. DDF is widely exploited in the information technology space and this session aims to share best practices and success stories to optimize your business with DDF. Some of the topics includes, infrastructure, security, protecting data over the network, monitoring resources (threads/connections), sysplex workload balancing, and so forth. The objective of this session is provide you with practical, useful knowledge that you can take back to your work and manage DDF confidently.

In modern DB2 for z/OS environments, delivering efficient, resilient, and reliable services depends on the alignment of multiple critical components. With the introduction of DORA regulations, the focus has evolved from simply ensuring service continuity to enhancing it by making recovery processes faster, more robust, and easier to manage.
While many technologies and strategies already support service continuity, real-world scenarios still reveal gaps, particularly when unexpected errors lead to temporary service disruptions impacting customers.
Starting from a legacy disaster recovery framework based on traditional batch jobs, we conducted a thorough assessment to identify limitations in flexibility, performance, and reliability. Building on this foundation, we redesigned and enhanced recovery processes by introducing new strategies, improving automation, and increasing customization to better align with business objectives.
In this presentation, we share our journey: from understand