Schedule

All Sessions are in CST and recordings will be made available after the conference

Tuesday, February 17

Room One

Incorporating SQL Views into Your Development Strategy
Speaker: Simon Hutchinson
8:30 AM – 10:30 AM

SQL Views are an underused but highly effective tool in IBM i development. This session shows how SQL Views can simplify applications by encapsulating business rules, reducing code duplication, and improving data consistency. Through practical examples, attendees will learn how views can streamline data access for RPG programs, enhance security, and support reporting and integration. Ideal for developers modernizing existing applications or building new IBM i solutions with SQL.

SYSTOOLS – A Master Class
Speaker: Scott Forstie

10:45 AM – 12:45 PM

Db2 for i provides useful tools and examples in the SYSTOOLS schema. Come to this session to learn about the awesome SYSTOOLS-based tools. You need not be an SQL programmer to gain tremendous value from SQL tools!

Tools, Tricks, and Tips to Enhance your SQL Performance

Speaker: Ryan Moeller
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Every programmer and system administrator should care about SQL query performance, but wrapping your head around SQL performance can be a daunting task. This session showcases a variety of technologies available to help anyone identify, mitigate, and improve SQL performance. Topics covered includes a variety of SQL services, ACS’s powerful SQL Performance Center, query writing tips, and much more.
 

Room Two

Work Management Magic – Calm the Chaos with Subsystems
Speaker: Dawn May
10:45 AM – 12:45 PM

As shipped by IBM, the default configurations of IBM i work well.  However, as the complexity of environments grow, the stock settings can make it difficult to fully understand and manage the workload.

IBM provides the ability to customize and tune the system, and in particular, use subsystems to better manage remote database access.  Many shops fail to embrace these work management capabilities. 

This FOCUS session will cover the benefits of using subsystems to their fullest extent to organize and optimize applications on your system. This session will guide you through the work management features that can be used to help you fully understand system resources used by your applications and tune them for best performance.

We will concentrate on how to set up subsystem descriptions and their various components, how to tune prestart job entires, how to tune memory pools used by subsystems, best practices for job descriptions, how and when to leverage workload groups, and more. 

This session will focus on using Navigator for i to do these tasks.  It will also touch upon how the Performance Data Investigator can help with your tuning exercises.

This session is intended for those who do not have extensive experience in setting up custom subsystems, routing work to those subsystems, and managing the performance of your IBM i. However, even for those who have embraced the use of custom subsystems for their environments, the session will have some tips for everyone.

 

Kerberos SSO End-to-End: Fundamentals, Flows, and Advanced Troubleshooting

Speaker: Robert Andrews
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

This session provides an end-to-end, practitioner-focused deep dive into Kerberos based Single Sign-On on IBM i, designed to be approachable for those new to the technology while still delivering real value to experienced engineers. We start by clearly explaining the core Kerberos concepts—tickets, principals, SPNs, and authentication flows—then progressively peel back the layers to show what actually happens during successful and failed logins. We will cover how both Network Authentication Services (NAS) and Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) work together within the IBM i. From there, we move beyond theory into real-world behavior, covering both single-hop and multi-hop (delegation) scenarios and why they so often break in enterprise environments. We will conclude the session by diving into advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting techniques, including common misconfigurations, delegation pitfalls, clock and DNS issues, and how to interpret logs and traces to pinpoint failures. Attendees will leave with a practical mental model of Kerberos, a clear understanding of how SSO works across hops, and concrete techniques they can immediately apply to debug complex authentication problems in production.
 

Wednesday, February 18

Room One

Design Your Own VS Code Extension and Extend Code for IBM i
Speaker: Sebastien Julliand
8:30 AM – 10:30 AM

VS Code marketplace hosts thousands and thousands of extensions. Dozen of developers created extensions that use extend Code for IBM i. Why not yours? Give it a shot, it’s easier than it looks! Join this session to learn about the fundamentals of VS Code extension coding, through a live, step by step approach. Discover how you can access the API exposed by Code for IBM i to run commands or Db2 for i queries on IBM i. Everybody is welcome, whether you’re looking to get started on VS Code extension development or learn new development tricks.

IBM i (SQL) Services – The Best of the Best!
Speaker: Scott Forstie
10:45 AM – 12:45 PM

SQL Services on IBM i is a hot topic because there are so many ways that SQL Services can bring unique value and ease of use to anyone using an IBM i. Attend this session to understand which SQL Services have proven to be some of the most powerful and popular with IBM i users.
 
The session will also include many working examples, to help you get started today!

One Dashboard to Rule Them All: IBM i Monitoring Workshop
Speaker: Aaron Magid
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Is your IBM i environment a monitoring black hole in your enterprise? Can you see real time graphical visualizations of your key business indicators? When systems fail, does everyone point fingers at IBM i because “we can’t see what’s happening in there”? Or, does your IBM i require monitoring tools that are different from those used by the rest of the organization? Time to change that narrative. In this intensive workshop, you’ll learn how to integrate your IBM i systems into enterprise monitoring platforms like Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, and Swagger, making your IBM i metrics as visible and actionable as any other system in your infrastructure. Through live demonstrations, you’ll see how to build comprehensive dashboards that track everything from system performance to application metrics. You’ll leave with working configurations and practical skills you can implement immediately.
 

Room Two

Mastering IBM Navigator for i: Modern Web-Based Management of your IBM i
Speaker: Ann Wilkerson
8:30 AM – 10:30 PM

Navigator for i is a modern web interface for managing IBM i systems. This session will provide a comprehensive overview of Navigator’s capabilities, including system monitoring, performance analysis, security configuration, and workload management. We will explore how to leverage its features to simplify everyday administrative tasks. Whether you’re new to IBM i or an experienced professional, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to maximize the value of Navigator for i.

Code for IBM i Deep Dive
Speaker: Liam Allan
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

VS Code is really built with developers in mind. IBM has been building a neat Visual Studio Code extensions that makes accessing and working with the database much simpler for developers. Not only can VS Code be used for writing in many different languages, but now it has great tools for working with Db2 for i.
 
In this session, we’ll show off the brand new things you’ve missed for RPGLE, the database extension and more. You might see exporting data, working with examples, browsing your schemas, or even managing multiple database configurations. Plus, a sneak peak at the AI integration for the Db2 for IBM i database extension
 
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