Alexander Abrashkevich has joined the IBM Toronto Lab in 2000. After working as a software developer in the Advanced Systems Development Department of the DB2 Unix Porting team, in 2003 he has joined the RASPD (Reliability Availability Serviceability and Problem Determination) development team and worked on various serviceability projects for DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows. A team lead since 2006. At the end of 2007 Alexander has joined the DB2 Health Advisor team and since then worked on the db2has data collector, staging server, parser for XMLizing collected data, and other projects. Since January 2010 Alexander is DB2 Health Advisor project lead. He frequently interacts with customers either to present the Health Advisor service or provide assistance related to the service, as well as to seek valuable customer feedback. Alexander has several patents and publications.

Frank Butt, IBM, is the development manager for DB2 for z/OS Query Runtime, Spatial Support, and Text Search. He has over 20 years of software development experiences focusing on database engines and applications. For the past 8 years, He has led the spatial database development effort for both DB2 LUW and z/OS. Since 2001, Frank has been a part time faculty member of Computer Science department at San Jose State University. He has taught various database courses including a new curriculum of DB2 for z/OS classes started in 2008.

Sheryl M. Larsen is president and founder of Sheryl M. Larsen, Inc., a consulting practice specializing in DB2 Systems Analysis and Advanced Education. She is an internationally recognized researcher, consultant and lecturer, specializing in large scale DB2 systems and is known for her extensive expertise in optimizing SQL. Sheryl has over 23 years experience in DB2, has published many articles, and co-authored a book, DB2 Answers, Osborne-McGraw-Hill, 1999. She was voted into the IDUG “Speaker Hall of Fame” in 2001, was the Executive Editor of the IDUG Solutions Journal magazine 1997-2000 and was a keynote speaker for the IDUG Asia Pacific 2002 Conference. Currently, she is President of the Midwest Database Users Group, a member of IBM's DB2 Gold Consultants program and an inaugural member of IBM's Data Champion program.

Dale McInnis is a Senior Technical Staff Member at the IBM Toronto lab and has a B.Sc.(CS) from the University of New Brunswick and a Masters of Engineering (M. Eng EE) from the University of Toronto. Dale joined IBM in 1988, and has been working on the DB2 development team since 1992. During this time, Dale has always focused on the DB2 Kernel development, such as backup and recovery, high availability and disaster recovery. More recently Dale has focused on designing high availability and disaster recovery features as well as integrating other IBM software products into the DB2 product, such as Tivoli System Automation for Multi Platforms, Tivoli Advanced Copy Services, and Infosphere Replication Server.  Dale is a regular speaker at the International DB2 Users Groups (IDUG) conferences worldwide, as well as DB2 Regional users groups. He also speaks at IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) conferences and is an active member of the High Availability(HA) Community of Practice (CoP) as well as the Business Continuity and Resiliency (BCR) World Wide CoP.

Brian Olynyk is a Staff Software Developer with the DB2 Early Adoption Team working out of the IBM Toronto Lab.  Brian graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering Science from the University of Western Ontario in 2006 and has been with IBM since.  Brian's career started on the DB2 Project Office team developing product demonstrations and demonstration tools, specifically, the Technology Explorer for IBM DB2 (db2mc.sourceforge.net).  Brian's DB2 expertise is centered around high availability solutions focusing on DB2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) and DB2 pureScale.