DB2’s Got Talent 2014 – Search Show #2

I continue to be amazed how much I can learn from 4-minute presentations. I should be used to it by now. There were some excellent presentations this week.

The Presentations

Prasad Pande – Online Tablespace Migration Using ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE

I very much enjoyed Prasad’s presenetation. He described the problem he was trying to solve well, covered alternate methods, and obviously researched the topic well, providing some information I was not familiar with.

From a pure presentation perspective, there were several things I saw:

• Lack of graphics in the presentation
• Some inconsistent capitalization
• On some slides, a mix of too many different font colors/sizes/types

On the technical side, I noted:

• Parameters passed to ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE must be in upper case (good callout)
• Good note that this impacts system performance
• Noted that many indexes may be troublesome, but did not note how or why
• Failed to note that support for RI was added in DB2 10.1 fixpack 2

Despite the criticism above, I thought this was an excellent presentation. There are three kinds of presentations I find it particularly hard to critique – those that are nearly perfect, those that are done by someone I know, and those that are just atrocious. Prasad shows real promise, and did a great job.

Prasad was chosen by the judges to move on to the next round.

Prasad’s contact information:
Twitter: @pandeprasad1
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/prasad-pande/24/292/a23
Blog: http://prasadspande.wordpress.com/

Rajesh Pandhare – Performance Tuning for Static SQL

Rajesh paid me a compliment. A phrase on one of his slides is nearly identical to one in my developerWorks article on finding problem SQL in the package cache. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but the moment I saw it, I knew it was something I had seen before. There are only so many ways to say some things, I suppose.

This is obviously a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I thought that Rajesh did a good job. The problem was stated well, and the presentation was laid out logically. I liked how Rajesh showed the SQL, but I wish he would have also shown some sample output from that SQL.

I would have placed Rajesh in the top 4, but he did not make the judges’ top 3 to move on to the next round.

Michael Krafick – Reclaim Space with DB2DART

Mike is a regular guest blogger for me. Check out his articles here and here. Mike is one of my buddies, and as a result, I am probably not an unbiased reviewer of his work. I liked the advanced and highly detailed nature of his topic. His presentation had nice colors and good font sizes. Great use of graphics – I guess having a wife who is a graphic designer helps in this area. The judges couldn’t come up with any real criticisms, and I can’t either. Disclaimer: I did review Michael’s presentation before the show, so had my chance to make suggestions at that point.

Mike was chosen by the judges to move on to the next round.

Mike’s contact information:
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkrafick
Twitter: @MKrafick

Raja – Act Quickly, Think Slowly

Raja Had a great logical presentation, with a clear problem statement. His graphics and animation were excellent, and worked well, even over the web. The topic was not one that I deal with much, since he focused on data skew within a DPF environment. I do understand it’s an issue if you work in DPF environments.

Raja was chosen by the judges to move on to the next round.

Raja’s contact information
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lrajasekhar
Twitter: @raja_iaf

Rusty Snellgrove – Changing Tablespaces the Easy Way

Rusty talked about ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE – an unfortunate choice since Prasad also did this topic, and the judges said that Prasad did it better. Huge props to Rusty for putting himself out there and presenting. It is hard, and takes courage to do. Unfortunately, his slides were very basic black and white, with no images. His text was far too wordy, and yet it seemed there was research missing behind his personal experiences. When sharing a case study, it is important to provide additional technical details as Prasad did with the various options and details like the fact that the parameters passed to ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE must be upper case. I’d love to see Rusty come back on February 28th with a new or improved presentation and make his way into the rest of the competition.

Harishkumar Baburao Pathangay – Event Monitor for Change History V10.1 and Above

I was excited to hear this topic, since I’ve been looking into the event monitor for change history. Harish had some fairly major audio issues that made it hard to hear most of his presentation. On some slides, Harish read each and every bullet, which I did not feel was required. I liked the amount of detail on the slides, but feel that sometimes you can mention a few bullets and let the slides speak for themselves. I also wished he would have mentioned the need to prune the output tables for change history event monitors – a manual process that must be done. I do hope he comes back on February 28th with a bit better audio. And maybe some graphics and a bit less green – the green of the slides was a bit overpowering

Go check out Harish’s video blog at http://www.youtube.com/db2luwacademy. He has some interesting stuff out there.

Swapna Vetcha – The Fire in Q

The first slide had me excited, though it’s not one of my pet subjects. Swapna sounded a bit nervous, and a bit like she was reading. She also had some issues with her presentation software. It was a very large topic for 4 minutes, she could have focused more on one area, perhaps. Because of this, she was also talking really fast. The presentation was very text-heavy with fairly small text, and had some capitalization errors. I liked the references that she provided at the end of the presentation – I’m a big fan of a references section in presentation. She did have some good graphics. I also liked that she provided a link to her developerWorks profile, but unfortunately I could not read it in my copy of the replay.

##Summary
Lots of good information last week, and I’ve already used some things I learned. If you’re not watching the shows, you really should. Go to https://www.dbisoftware.com/db2nightshow/ to sign up. I’m so late with this post that it is almost time for the next show!

As always, if the contestants object to the sharing of any of the information above, or want to share additional contact information, let me know in the comments below.