Haakon Roberts has over 20 years' experience working with DB2 on the mainframe platform, spanning various aspects of systems programming, database administration and software support. Since 1999 he has worked directly for DB2 development and is currently a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Silicon Valley Laboratory in San Jose, California, with primary focus on availability, service and serviceability issues.

1^st presentation:
Large objects have rapidly moved from niche to mainstream since their introduction in Version 6. This presentation provides an overview of LOB management and exploitation and reviews the significant enhancements to LOB processing provided by DB2 Version 9.1 for z/OS, both with respect to availability, management, application programming and performance.

2^nd presentation:
Maximizing data and subsystem availability is absolutely key to the successful management of today's data processing environments. A number of significant availability enhancements have been provided in the maintenance stream in DB2 UDB for z/OS Version 8. This presentation focuses on these, and also details further improvements incorporated in DB2 Version 9.1 for z/OS.