Database Workshop Day – Central Canada Db2 Users Group

Db2 LUW Workshop

Transform your traditional relational database into an intelligent AI-powered search engine—without ever leaving Db2! In this hands-on workshop, you’ll build a complete semantic search system that turns customer data into searchable vector embeddings using Db2’s native vector capabilities and LLM integration. Learn to write natural language queries like “Find customers who frequently buy electronics” and get instant, semantically-relevant results. Through a practical 10-step pipeline, you’ll master the new Db2 capabilities that enable this use case: embedding generation with external AI models, vector indexing with DiskANN, and lightning-fast similarity search—all using familiar SQL. Walk away with a production-ready semantic search system and the skills to bring AI capabilities to any enterprise database. No external vector databases, no complex ETL pipelines—just pure Db2 power!

IBM Db2 offers a wide range of AI features, both built-in and external tools, for creating AI systems and solutions. These include over 200 built-in AI stored procedures and tools that work seamlessly with open-source AI ecosystems. In this workshop, participants will explore Db2’s AI support and use a selection of these features to implement practical AI models. The workshop consists of two parts. In the first module, participants will learn how to develop a supervised AI model using Db2’s built-in AI stored procedures. The entire model development and usage will be done using SQL within the database. In the second module, participants will learn how to create a Python model using popular Python packages outside of the database, and then deploy that model back into a Db2 database. By the end of the workshop, participants will have gained fundamental skills and hands-on experience in utilizing these AI capabilities. They will be able to apply these skills to their future AI projects. This workshop is designed to be beginner-friendly and does not require participants to have extensive knowledge in AI. Basic SQL skills and some Python programming skills are sufficient for attending and benefiting from this workshop.

This workshop will give you the education and information you need to use existing and new features of Amazon RDS for Db2. Some of the topics covered during this workshop will include provisioning, scaling, backup, monitoring, migration and beyond. Each module will be introduced and presented and then participants will be provided an environment they can use and go through a series of instructor led exercises to practice what they have learned and explore. This will be a joint workshop between the IBM and AWS RDS teams.