Michael Krafick

Michael Krafick is an aspiring Zamboni driver and well known twig-eater. During the day he is a Sr. Database Engineer for a Fortune 500 company. He is a frequent contributor to datageek.blog, an IBM champion, member of the DB2 Technical Advisory Board, and IDUG speaker Hall of Fame inductee. With over 18 years experience in DB2 for LUW, Mike works hard to educate and mentor others.

Joined: December 6, 2012
Articles: 35
Comments: 33

IDUG, Uncategorized

IDUG 2024: Tech Sessions & NASCAR

It’s summer! Kids are out of school, the pools are open, and …. technical conferences are in full swing? For those who are not aware, the IDUG North America 2024 technical conference is happening next week in Charlotte, NC (June…

Featured

Db2: On-Prem vs. Amazon RDS

This blog entry compliments a webinar on February 8th where I will be a panelist answering questions on Amazons RDS for Db2. Register for “Introducing Amazon RDS for Db2”now. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at IDUG…

Michael Krafick
January 31, 2024
4 Comments

Featured, Uncategorized

AWS Relational Database Service for Db2

IBM, the Death Star, and rise of the Resistance. In the spring of 2018, Ember and I attended a dinner with members of the Db2 Technical Advisory Board (TAB). This was a collection of respected Db2 end-users, clients, and consultants…

Michael Krafick
November 27, 2023

Featured

Db2 One Way Hashing as a Data Masking Solution

Database performance is heavily influenced by data volume and cardinality (or how unique that data may be). It’s interesting to watch the look on someone’s face when this concept clicks. There is a look of understanding from a developer when…

Uncategorized

Rollback Statements and the IBM Sterling Order Management System

There have been a few times in my career where I have been stunned by something I have seen while at work. Sometimes it was the good type of stunned. Like the first time first time I observed a truly…

IDUG

IDUG Down Under

Sometimes I think that Db2 is one of the most widely used but least known databases. Db2 has been adopted all over the world and that scope is evident when the International Db2 User Group (IDUG) holds a technical conference…

Michael Krafick
September 8, 2018
2 Comments

Uncategorized

Announcing DISCOVER.DB2

When I was in my early thirties, I was diagnosed with a learning disability. This really put my learning style into perspective. Teaching myself via a book was incredibly hard, and still is in some ways. Where I thrived was…

Michael Krafick
August 23, 2018
2 Comments

Reducing Contention: Changing Default Isolation Level for Websphere Commerce (WCS)

The Problem I often lean on analogies when I speak to non-technical people about technical topics. For example, I would explain database locking as “two kids fighting for the same candy bar”. If you introduce isolation levels into the conversation,…

Michael Krafick
November 2, 2017
1 Comment

Establishing a DB2 JDBC Connection

Recently I was forced outside my comfort zone and asked to vet various open source BI tools. I was a report developer in a past life, a database administrator supporting datamarts at various employers, and even supported Cognos backend databases.…

Michael Krafick
October 26, 2017
5 Comments

Troubleshooting with Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and Cinderella

It’s that magical time of year again. DBAs excitedly pack their bags for a week-long trip. On-call rotation is hurriedly passed to the next poor soul on the rotation list. Ember dons her trademark pigtails. Melanie Stopfer crams another 20…

Michael Krafick
April 21, 2017

Moving Mountains with a Redirected Restore

With the development and adoption of automatic storage the art of the redirected restore is going the way of the dinosaur. For those with systems that are running the tried and true (and deprecated) DMS (Database Managed Storage) table spaces…

Michael Krafick
August 4, 2016
1 Comment

Going Beyond 2 Servers – HADR as a High Availability/Disaster Recovery option.

When the client considers high availability and disaster recovery, they often do not know what they are talking about. Many times the client may be dropping buzzwords like “five nines”. To them this is the definition of disaster recovery. In…

Michael Krafick
January 12, 2016
5 Comments