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.


Posts:

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 on at least three different continents each year.… Read the rest

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

Krafick

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, I would expand the analogy to include “one sibling holding on to a candy bar they care nothing about just because they don’t want the other sibling getting to it”.… Read the rest

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Establishing a DB2 JDBC Connection

KrafickRecently 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. I thought my past experience gave me an edge when it came to evaluating BI tools.… Read the rest

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

KrafickWhen 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 other cases, they are thinking of a worst-case scenario where a whole data center falls off the face of the earth and they need high availability.… Read the rest

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