IDUG Db2 Table Talk
IDUG Db2 Table Talk
From assembler to AI: Sheryl Larsen on Optimizing DB2 on the Mainframe
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Sheryl Larsen, IBM Gold Consultant and Hall of Fame speaker, shares how she was “forced” from robotics and assembler into DB2 and turned it into a lifelong passion for optimizers and performance tuning. Sheryl also discusses the surprising growth of mainframe MIPS in the AI era, security driven hybrid cloud realities, and war stories from rescuing real world workloads under extreme pressure.
Learn more about IDUG, the International Db2 User Group, at www.idug.org.
Hi everyone, thanks for joining us. Today is IDEC Podcast. We speak to some great people in the DV2 community.
SPEAKER_05And I'm TV Consta, and we represent the IDEC Content Committee. We hope you enjoy today's edition.
SPEAKER_04And it gives me great pleasure today to introduce Keller Larson. This has been uh a while waiting for this, but she is an absolute superstar in the world of DB2. Um, she has probably contributed in some way to the DB2 education of every DB2 DBA in existence on the planet. So welcome, Sheryl Larson.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. That's quite a compliment.
SPEAKER_05Well, thank you for joining us. Yeah, you're an absolute legend. We're so glad to be talking to you.
SPEAKER_00I I was at one point required reading. So this is way back before the internet in Australia. That um anytime I wrote an article, and I wrote about a hundred, um, it was required reading in Australia. Wow.
SPEAKER_05So, how did you get into DBT? Was it something that you were always destined for?
SPEAKER_00No, no, I was I was forced into it and I went into it kicking and screaming. Ready to hear this story. I was a robotics major, an assembler guru. I got an offers from every aerospace company on the planet. Um, yeah, uh it's gifted in assembler, right? Complex language. You can't get more complex than that, I don't think. You know, I can only remember one character long, MVCL. It's the only one I can remember right now. Um, but anyway, that I'm walking out the door, you know, that way, and I uh get hired at Northrop Grumman, who happened to be a beta site for DB2. So I won't say what year, then you'll figure out how old I am. But anyway, it wasn't even generally available yet. And and uh they hired me on and they said, Cheryl, you're the new newbie. You are to go up to the third floor. There are some DBAs up there, and they're gonna teach you all about um this new database called DB2. I'm like, DB, what? DB2. Okay, and so so so here was the my first introduction. Select from where group by having order by I'm looking at this language, going, This is the silliest thing I've ever seen. This is it. This is it. So I go home from that, and I was engaged at the time, and my fiance said, who's still my husband, um, oh, just shut up and do it. Learn that silly little language.
SPEAKER_05Easy prevent to assembler, right?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And so it became uh my passion in a way because I always like to know how this works behind the scenes. So I dug into that optimizer and I became really good friends with the the author of that optimizer, uh Dr. Pat Salinger. And we're still friends to this day, yes, and I as a gold consultant, so I was one of the original seven gold consultants that were invited to the lab. Um, they they wanted independent, and I was independent at the time because I own my own company. Uh, they wanted a group of independents to help steer them in the course of their technology because they're in a bubble in Silicon Valley or Toronto. In fact, we ended up go switching between Toronto and Silicon Valley every year, right? So we could advise both labs.
SPEAKER_05Um and uh ZOS and the LEW labs that you're investing, is it?
SPEAKER_00Yes, right. Wow. Um, so yeah, we had a lot of influence on nitpicky things. Uh I was nitpicky about query rewrites. I was like, why should I have to do that? You should do that for me. All right. And why why do I want to use an or you can't figure out it's this or this, and and I've got a this equals this, why can't you just assume in in a you know translate that this is also equal to that? Or or you know, that kind of thing, transitive closure. Right. So I insisted that's a good thing. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_04Oh, nice one. So we have you to thank for uh query rewrite then, have we? So what happened next?
SPEAKER_00Um job offers. I had, and this is back when it was not popular to change jobs. I had a new job for six years every single year. I went to the next highest bidder and made lots and lots of money. Yeah. And by the time I came out of that six years, I ended up um uh at I can't even remember, BMC, somebody, uh for six years. And then I had six year stunt, six years here, six years there, six years, you know, and and two of the years uh 2013 to 15, I actually worked for IBM. So I walked, I was at a gold meeting in Silicon Valley Lab and I walked up to the the GM at the time. They named his street after him, but I can't think of his name right now. Uh and I said, Do you need any help? And he said, Yeah, me get with my secretary and let let's um let's talk. Uh get on my schedule on Wednesday. I think this was a Monday or something. And um so that that gets set up, and I had a good friend of mine, Reed Messick, he was prepping me for it. He goes, he goes, You need to talk to them about being the new Roger Miller in high heels. And so I said that to him, and and it freaked him out. He said, I'm not gonna be able to unsee that. And that's how I was hired. Yeah, hired is the new Roger Miller. First thing I wrote was the announcement of DB210, the official press release. I wrote that.
SPEAKER_04But you also worked, you also worked with uh the late great Richard Yavich.
SPEAKER_00Richard Yavich, yes. He he rescued me. When was that though? That was before I waited.
SPEAKER_01That was before I came on the page, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but you've also worked for platinum and bmc. So what was it Richard and Crew first and then?
SPEAKER_00I wish I had my resume next to me. I'm sorry. I should have printed that.
SPEAKER_05Uh no, I can't remember. Uh but you also worked with um Susan Lawson, didn't you? You you were all working together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the two of us. Yes. And and she had blonde hair at one point, and people to this day confuse us because she's Susan Marie Lawson, and I'm Cheryl Marie Larson. Oh isn't that the weirdest thing? Then I go visit her and walk into I and I and I see her master bedroom. We have the same bed spread.
SPEAKER_04Two things on the same pod.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it's crazy. And we both love cats. She's got me coons. I have Siamese. Yes. Oh wow. How many of you go? I don't I have two at all times, right? Never I always pick when when two go, so we're on our third set, we pick up two more. Right. Sounds nice.
SPEAKER_04So working in the principles of uh like disaster recovery and then reduplication, so always have two at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04Julia's our cat lady.
SPEAKER_05Yes, yes, I've got a cat, and he's very helpful. And that's all I'll say about him.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, but they're really the the one that I have, she's such a cat, we can't do anything in the kitchen, even just shuffled papers, and she has to cup up on the island and inspect our work. Yeah, so we we had to train her, you know, especially if we're doing food prep there. We have a sink over there. You sit in that sink and you can watch us from there. That's her sink. Yes. Because she's got to be there, she's gotta be there looking at what what are you doing up here? Yeah, and cats do love to sit in sinks.
SPEAKER_05Oh, great. Um, okay, so you've you worked for the big vendors uh in various roles, I think. Technical and marketing, is that right? And sales, yeah. Sales.
SPEAKER_00I actually ordered with me MC too.
SPEAKER_04And you worked uh you worked for Kindrel for a while?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, Kindle.
SPEAKER_04So, how do you find the adoption of hybrid cloud, which is something that IBM have been pushing for a while now? How do you find the adoption of that in uh customer sites? And what does it look like? Because I've had to describe hybrid cloud to students and university professors, and I get my tongue tied.
SPEAKER_00The numbers that just came out, and you if you read IBM's announcement around the AI, they specifically said mainframe MIPS are exploding. Why? They want to train their models on the mainframe. Their sales are, I'm gonna call them exponential. They didn't, they may not have used that word, but they are going nuts, absolutely nuts.
SPEAKER_04So traditionally, for for decades, people have been trying to get off the mainframe and still are. So, and it's it and it's been an embarrassment just for big corporations to say, hey, we still run our workload on a mainframe. In fact, they don't even want to admit that. So, do you think that's changing?
SPEAKER_00Oh, the the MIPS report from IBM says absolutely that's changed. Yes. Do you want to train your models in a public cloud? No. Even if you just to talk about your own private cloud, those are still have a higher risk of of uh being intercepted somehow. So no, you want to keep it as close as close to your vest as possible.
SPEAKER_04Well, this is good news for us. Both as vendors and as uh as users of the mainframe infrastructure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm still you know, good. Arvin will still, you know, say hi to me and we talk at conferences and and you know, he's still in charge. And he came from research, but he has become a great sales and marketeer for that company. But because he came from research, he was the best at monetizing their technology and still is because that you know they've got more research labs than all the other software companies combined. So, what comes out of those? His brain helps monetize what comes out of those labs.
SPEAKER_04That's their claim to that was a good deal getting uh an RD chap into uh upper management. Good show.
SPEAKER_05If we go back to to DB2 in the the early days, I guess, you've you've essentially been involved since right at the beginning of DB2 on ZOS.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05But you've obviously grown to love it over the years. But what have been the biggest enhancements, do you think, or changes over the last oh, how many years is it now?
SPEAKER_0130 years.
SPEAKER_00So so adding more um intelligence into the optimizers and and especially the query rewrite. And the two labs went about it differently. The Z lab wanted to put it inside the optimizer, and the LUW lab, and I haven't been in touch with them in a while, but um they they said no, we're gonna keep it on the outside. Uh it was it's just a different implementation of of how they infused those technologies, right?
SPEAKER_05Right. So I guess that's why they've kind of gone in slightly different directions, and we're already seeing that for LUW they've got the AI optimizer, whereas on Zed we don't yet.
SPEAKER_00Right. No, ours got infused, it's already in there.
SPEAKER_05Ah, right. And what what else has really made a difference over the years when you've been working with your cut clients or even with the vendors? What what are the things that have changed in DBT that have been the most impactful for the customers and the businesses that you work with?
SPEAKER_00Well, they want to the customers may not agree, but it's the the SQL language itself. Uh you know, it went from that little bitty select from where by having order by to I've seen uh statements uh and I use one in my my my coding class and I will just keep letting it scroll. It's thousands of lines long. Thousands of lines, and then I wrote it, you know, a lot of my presentations. I could do that in one statement, and you absolutely can. You know, so one month's a statement. It's it's data gymnastics in a in a in a program. And and this this programmer, I didn't write it, but I they sent it to me, and I was so impressed. I asked, I said, can can you give me permission to at least scroll this in front of people? I'm not gonna send it to anyone, but um it was well documented. You know, this paragraph does this, this this does this. And I've also witnessed and had to tune a lot of recursive SQL programs. This this one was at a client and they had just upgraded their mainframe because this statement, this program was consuming a tremendous amount of CPU. So they said, Cheryl, could you take a look at this? And and I said, Well, wow, look at all this recursive SQL is doing. I said, the problem is there's no there's no indexes on the temp tables that this recursive SQL uses. And I was working with Dave Belke at the time, and I said, let's let's put it some clustering indexes on these things. And Dave was like, Well, I don't think that's gonna save very much. So much they wanted to give their main their upgraded mainframe back. They pretended to call IBM and go, you know what, we don't need this anymore.
SPEAKER_05So was performance tuning one of your main roles when you're an independent consultant.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, yes, yes. And I could say I was I was not only brought back once, but 99% of the time I'm brought back, you know, sometimes it's boiled ocean, and then sometimes, you know, we've got this this transaction. And I'll just give you the example. It was um a university, um, and this was thousands of students, tens of thousands of students, uh trying to get their schedules, you know, done. And one of the modules was was just being pummeled. Because when you think about you know, your your typical college students, what is their patience level? Two, three seconds, two, three seconds. And so it would hang because it's being pummeled, and they go, okay, I got another laptop, I got another screen, I got them all. It just went exponential. Um yeah, and it was the problem was the access path of that module uh was doing a hybrid several hybrid joins, and the rib pool kept failing. So this is back when the rib pool didn't have an overflow, and you know, run out of room and then fix itself kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. So, so so how do you kill a hybrid join? Optimize for one row. And it wasn't needing one row, it just needed to kill the hybrid join. And so upon leaving, I was like, okay, you guys got to kill all this, you know, hybrid join and list prefetch stuff that's going on. And uh, but they overkilled it and they said, you know, we had a I got a call later. I'm at another site, and I go, Oh, we had a problem, we had this one thing that just died after that. And I go, well, sometimes you need to get every single row from it, and then you do need list prefetch and hybrid join. When you're fetching to the very end, and especially if you need a order by after that, you you you need that technology, so don't turn it all off. Okay.
SPEAKER_04So there are loads of little tricks that uh that we've used in the past as DBAs uh coding other people's SQL for them, like optimize for one row or one equals one.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, the old one, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so who came up with these in the first place? That's what I'd like to know.
SPEAKER_00IBM documented the one equals one.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And they had to preserve it because they since they encouraged it, they couldn't take it away. Because there are still programs out there that still have it in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So the optimizer is their optimizer is still aware of it and it respects it and does what it used to do.
SPEAKER_04So are all of these tricks now catered for, not just tolerated, but uh they're still catered for in the in the optimizer?
SPEAKER_05Yes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, wow.
SPEAKER_05Marcus mentioned about education in his introduction to you, and we know that you've been in the iDug Hall of Fame for your presentations at iDug, and and you've always got an amazing presence when you speak. How did that happen? Is that something that you've you've had to train for, or are you a natural educator?
SPEAKER_00It took about a hundred presentations. I was a wallflower, very shy, and I would get quite ill in nerves before my presentations. Yes, I'd sit up front, I'd sit up front, and and I didn't realize you know that I was gonna have four or five or seven hundred people behind me. Right? I'm sitting there as the room fills up, and it ends up standing room only. I stand up and I'm like and then I got used to it after about a hundred bit flips in in and then you just realize you're having a conversation. And the only the only the fear of speaking is not innate that you build up and and that it's a fear most people have in front of even small crowds. Um, but once that bit flips, that you're just having a conversation, there's no nerves at all. And and I just you know, I tell other new speakers, it took a hundred for me. I hope it doesn't take a hundred for you.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I don't know how many times I've presented, not as many as a hundred for sure, but I'm still in the very queasy feeling before I speak. So yeah, a long way to go. Lots of lots of practice, and I just like take advice from expert speakers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, practice is it, and um yeah, I even practice, I even filmed myself. I had my daughter uh film me uh we had a record uh movie camera and I put it on an ironing board and I you know did my presentation and I and I you know conversed with her as my audience. It's like, do you think you want to move forward this technology technology, Cara? And she said, Absolutely.
SPEAKER_05Oh that's my idea.
SPEAKER_04You practice your presentations in front of the mirror or you as well. So I having a camera film yourself, uh that's something that I'd never even thought of.
SPEAKER_00Well, then you can critique yourself because you um I didn't realize, and um she one of my older daughters showed up at one of my eye ducks. She flew with me because it was a we're we went to a cool, really cool place. Uh I forget which European conference that was, but she she decided to come with me. Um and she wrote down how many times I said, um, yeah. I didn't know I didn't know I was doing that. If she wrote how many she she counted them and said in some other, you know, filler words. You don't hear them when you're speaking, but someone else pays attention, and that's what someone filming you to show you back what you did helps. It helps you uh hear them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's really good advice, actually.
SPEAKER_04That's great advice. Yeah, I'm gonna have to do that before next week.
SPEAKER_05So the the education side of things, again, uh you've you've also written a book where you Co-authored a book, haven't you? Yeah, on my claim was saying you can still buy on Amazon.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I because I donated them. I donated all my courses when I retired. Um, because I wanted other DBAs to like use because my slides are the coolest things. I was kind of wanting to be a graphic designer, and I went into mathematics instead and ended up in computer science. But then what falls on my lap, PowerPoint. And I learned how to animate all my PowerPoints. So my very famous Let's Talk Access Path presentation. Every one of those access paths is uh is animated, it shows you the flow, and I have spinning triangles where they're sorts, and I even put little chime music to this stuff. So when this is on a big screen, people are looking at it going, oh my god, and they get it because they're they're witnessing it flow that where the data flows through it, and that's what made me best overall speaker several times and kick me out of the hall of fame is my slides.
SPEAKER_05Right, right.
SPEAKER_00So did you say that these uh these are all in the public domain now? Yeah, they're all available. Um, they're on iDugs, it should be on still on iDug's uh website. I basically encourage other DBAs to use them. It's you know, I'm yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. Please take my really cool technology and uh yeah. Uh my my good friends, uh my guinea pigs were was uh Annexter, uh so I can brag about that company. Um they're only an hour from my house. Um so um so they had me there frequently because I had no travel really. Uh and uh I can even tell you, um they um their their CIO is like, well, we can't keep keep our developers out of coding for you know uh a lengthy class. You know, we gotta keep them coding. And I said, All right, let's do lunch and learns. Because they gotta eat, right? So let's make them 90 minutes and uh and the CIO says, yeah, they they gotta eat, and you know, we just extend their lunch a little bit, and so um for two weeks straight, they had 90-minute sessions Monday through Friday to get them through my coding advanced coding class, which is the first week, and the advanced tuning class was the second week.
SPEAKER_04Sweet, clever way of doing that. So you've done a fair bit of education, uh consulting and traveling, world world travel. Do you have any uh any war stories or funny anecdotes from your uh history?
SPEAKER_00Well, it puts you in a car uh for all my local uh runs to Caterpillar, so two hours from Chicago, and I did that pretty often. And this uh one time I'm in a brand new 325. It's blue with white interior. I remember I told my husband it's leather, even if the kids spill ice cream on it, we can wipe it off. So that's how we ended up with that car, and uh, and uh so I'm uh I'm doing my zoom, it's two hours 20 minutes, but I try to do it in two, if you know what I mean. And I had some uh and I'm passing um some semis, and I see the semis that keep moving in front of me as I'm approaching, kind of to slow me down, and they're talking to each other, right? And so it's a series of of of semis that are pulling in front of me, and I'm getting this is annoying, you know, and they would honk honk at me, and I'm like, I'm sure it's the hair, yeah, kind of thing. Um, and then sure enough, we I get pulled over, you know, 10 miles in front. And they they see me um and they honk their home as they're going by, okay. So the officer comes up and he's got that grim hat right on here. It's like, ma'am, ma'am, do you don't realize you're speeding? And I look up at him and go, Oh, was I? I didn't realize. He and he says, You really should be using your cruise control. And I said, Do you know where that is in this car? What button is it?
SPEAKER_04Like he didn't know.
SPEAKER_00He shakes his head and he points it out to me. I was like, Oh, thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04So you didn't do it in two hours 20 that day.
SPEAKER_00But he got away with it. Yeah, I got a warning. He did not give me a ticket. No, no, he he walked after writing that morning. He just shook his head as he walked back. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Oh I guess you have traveled uh a num a very, very large number of miles, uh, both in America and around the world. Probably you've probably been around the world a couple of times with all your travels.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, 1.5 million on United. Wow, 1.5 million miles. Yep.
SPEAKER_04Oh, it's impressive. We should make a big deal about it.
SPEAKER_00Um my husband has a million, he just hit a million and they made a big deal about it. And you know, United has yet to make a big deal out of me. But uh I went to Australia 14 times. Ah, okay, yeah, that will help. So he made a million, but he's never been to Australia, actually.
SPEAKER_05So oh, okay. So what out of all of the places you've been in the world, is there anywhere that you you absolutely love and that you could you'd recommend that we all should go and visit?
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, and I took my mother and my sister because because it's so spectacular. It's called Cairns, Cannes, Australia, and it's um right near the Great Barrier Reef where we went snor, we went snorkeling, and they take you out and you snorkel and and you scuba dive with the fish, and it's crystal blue. And the other the other part is you're 10 minutes from where you stay, you're 10 minutes from the rainforest, one way, and you're you're you're 10 minutes from holding um the koala bears the other way.
SPEAKER_05It sounds quite quite spectacular though. I've never been to Australia at all, but it is somewhere that I'd love to go, so I'll have to remember to go and visit there as well. If I oh that's so big, isn't it? If you go you're in one place, it's so many miles to get to another place.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it fits on top of the United States. It's the size of the United States. So when BMC sent me out to do a tour, five cities in Australia, I was cruising across the entire United States in five days.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's one road trip.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, I spoke for six hours each day. They poured my body back on a plane and I landed in next to these.
SPEAKER_04How many time zones?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, a few time zones as well. Do you know how many eye ducks you've spoken at or attended? 35. Right, that's a lot.
SPEAKER_04That's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_00And um, I haven't been a speaker at all of them. Right, but some of them you've attended anyway. I'll give you the good news. So the current um conference chair contacted me and said, you know, Cheryl, you you're so you do such good training for the newbies. Could you please submit some sessions just for the newbies? Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I just they know 50% of their first time are 50% of iDuck attendees are first-time attendees. Now that doesn't mean they're brand new DBAs, but it's their first time into you know that conference, and they may be new to DB2. They may be coming from Oracle or another, you know, like you know, DBMS, Postgres, or something like that. And they need to learn the Z side and terminology and all that. Yeah, so let's get you transitioned into our our world.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. So people can hope to see you at iDug North America, which is end of October. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, you would hope, okay, but I'll have to tell you about another experience I had a previous, probably two iDUGs ago, asked me the same, submitted the same. Can you please submit? And I did, and I got rejected. But later, uh uh a speaker called and ill, and then he sought me out, and he goes, Cheryl, I have good news for you. I've got a session for you. So I can put you in the grid. And I said, Well, well, that's that's great. I didn't even bring a laser pointer because I wasn't even supposed to speak, right? I had to borrow one from Dave Elke. I had four people in my room. Wow, yeah. So no, I and I did when I usually do spectacular because there's four people, could be one, and I still do present.
SPEAKER_05Um but uh yeah, yeah, that's that's a tough one, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. We recently had uh virtual GS UK conference and uh we had loads of streams. Uh some streams had one attendee, other streams had 25, and some streams had 80. So you just can't you just can't uh predict who's gonna turn up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and I mean it's great at these conferences that have multiple streams because you have so much choice, but then it can make it difficult because you you sometimes have to choose between two things that you really want to see, and yeah, sometimes people just follow the crowd to another one, don't they?
SPEAKER_04But the good thing is if they're recorded, then many people can see your presentations over and over again at uh studio.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and they do um they do track those stats, and and I did find out that it was you know some of the most popular in terms of numbers, some of my presentations, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I'll I'll never forget Bonnie Baker's uh sessions when I was starting out as a DBA and she'd use kitchen analogies and her kids bringing back prefetch, yes. The list prefetch, yeah. That was that's stuck in my mind and it's still there.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it sounds great. I missed it. It was her daughter Beth bringing the dishes over to the dishwasher. Yeah, that was her analogy. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04So sequential prefects would be like going back and forth, bringing one dish at a time. Then you got uh list prefects where you know the son would come along and he'd stack up, say, a handful of dishes and then bring those at a time to the uh to the sink to wash them up.
SPEAKER_05Oh, this is good. This is really good. That's the sort of thing that really sticks in your head, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. I missed all of that.
SPEAKER_04It's just it's a skill, it's a skill to be able to uh analogize technical content and turn it into something that uh newbies can can grasp hold of and understand.
SPEAKER_00Yep, she she did with analogies what I do with the the PowerPoints. Yes, right, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I'm gonna have to look for your PowerPoints.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, I am as well. Because I don't know if I've seen all of the ones that you mentioned, and they they sound like they'd be a really, really useful watch.
SPEAKER_00No, the the fanciest one was Let's Talk Access Paths.
SPEAKER_05Okay, I'm gonna note that down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 27 different access paths, and they haven't added a new one lately. Okay, cool.
SPEAKER_05So when you're not DB2ing, what do you like to do with your time?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm uh a retired um collegiate swimmer. Uh, had a scholarship in college. Um, and when you are a swimmer since age six, um, you what you don't possess is portion control. Because you can eat. Uh in college I had double workouts. I it was a chore for me. I had to eat 10,000 calories a day just to keep meat on my bones. I know that that's you could be envious of that, but it to me it was like thank goodness my sorority chef would bake these upside-down pineapple cakes. Yeah, and I I uh I got to feast on those every night. Yeah. So you still swim? Yes, I do. Yes, I do just swim and I swim uh uh a half a mile, takes about 30-40 minutes. I do high-intensity sets. Um, and um because you can't run every day, and I still don't have portion control, so I still need to keep quite active.
SPEAKER_05Right. I remember when I saw you at I dug in Charlotte, you were you were running everywhere.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, get up, and I'm a morning exercise person, uh, because uh especially swimming, as long as your hair's wet, like you gotta take a shower anyway. Go get wet and then take a shower.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. And do you do is it biathlons or triathlons? You do triathlons, yes.
SPEAKER_00It's swim, bike, run, swim, bike, run.
SPEAKER_04Wow, it's impressive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't do the long ones anymore. I think um, yeah, my favorite was Chicago, and Chicago uh boasts the the world's largest triathlon, and the reason it's the most popular is there are no mountains in Chicago. It's very it's very flat. You you bike, you swim the lakeshore uh quite safe in Monroe Harbor. You bike uh Lakeshore Drive, so you get these beautiful city views as you go up and down the highway. You know, those are the only hills you have, is going over the the highway ramps and things, and then your jog is on the the walking walk being walking path right on the water. Uh it's the most beautiful, and um participants can can line the entire course. Uh so everyone can can watch their favorite person and do signs and ring bells and all that and encourage everyone. Oh amazing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05That sounds really good. And are your are your kids following in your footsteps? Are they IT professionals?
SPEAKER_00Uh IT, no, they were allergic. Mom, we don't want to do it. Uh, but they this is the funny part. This was, I think, three years ago. Um, they're both professionals. One is a neuroscientist, and the other is an international studies uh graduate. They both had it had to take an SQL class. And I found on Mother's Day, so I zipped up my introduction and advanced and my tuning class. I zipped it up and I sent it to both of them. The the real code. And I said, Don't don't print these, these are to be viewed with the animation. Yes, for you to really absorb what's in these classes, you better put them on your laptop and hit play. No, don't be flipping through this thing. You need to answer that. Yeah, they appreciated it.
SPEAKER_05Kids don't print anything now, anyway, do they?
SPEAKER_00Oh no, no, no, they stream everything.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05Oh well, that sounds amazing. Sounds like they're doing really well as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that request came on a Mother's Day. It was like, this is the best day of my life.
SPEAKER_05Happy Mother's Day to me. I can share this wealth of knowledge that I've got with my kids. How wonderful!
SPEAKER_04Brilliant. Well, we're approaching the end of our slot, and this has been a great conversation, and it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Cheryl. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and experience with the world and for taking some time out of your busy retirement to have a little chat with us for the iDug podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Yes, and and you're never retired, retired. I still get people sending me SQL and ask for help in tuning. And it's kind of like my breakfast thing. It's like, oh, what do I get to tune today?
SPEAKER_05Oh, brilliant. Well, it's good to know that people can still talk to you about it. That's excellent. Super, and we'll see you hopefully at iDug. Yes, I'll be there. Great. Thanks again.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for having me. Bye.
SPEAKER_05Visit iDug.org for the latest DB2 community news, information about events, and all of our technical content. Tune in again soon for the next podcast at iDog.org forward slash podcast.