Oh man, my first blog post! Before we start diving into cool technical topics about Database Administration and SQL Server, I want to take this opportunity to give some background on myself. I was an intentional DBA from the get-go. I started getting involved with SQL Server in 2019 when I got my first student job as a Database Manager at Arizona State University. There was one SQL Server, and it had three databases on it. Boy was I overwhelmed. Other than learning about SQL syntax from W3Schools.com, I didn’t know jack about anything. Importing a CSV file to a table? Someone call NASA!

From there, I got my first internship as a Data Engineer at DriveTime, a sister company to CARVANA. Anyways, here I was able to grow my skills, and become more confident in navigating tools like SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Visual Studio, and other tools like these. Two weeks into this internship, I went up to my mentor at the time and asked “How do I become a DBA?”. He smiled, and pointed me to the Director of the DBA team. Eager and naive, I asked the Director the same question along with “What does being a DBA look like?” and “Can I be on the team?”. I giggle at myself looking back at this interaction. You hear of the stereotypical DBA being mean, always saying no, and being a general grouch. He wasn’t though, at least to me. He started listing off a bunch of DBA buzz words like High Availability, Disaster Recovery, backups, restores, performance tuning, etc… I even remember thinking that High Availability meant being available to the business 24×7 in case something went wrong. He told me to keep in touch after my data engineering internship ended and we can re-evaluate.

I ended up getting the opportunity to intern on the DBA team starting as a Jr. DBA for about a year. I went through a lot of trainings, readings, and on-the-job experiences that ultimately resulted in me being brought on full time after college as a Database Administrator Level 1. I felt on top of the world. I grew more and more taking on more responsibilities and learning new technologies. I eventually left DriveTime as a shop DBA and joined a new company as a DBA Consultant; Straight Path Solutions. I’ve been here for about six months at the time of writing this and I can tell you honestly, unfiltered, that I’m going to stay here as long as they’ll have me. The group of brilliant minds that work here, as well as the amount of technical exposure I get on a daily basis has skyrocketed my career. I’ll have a post about Shop DBAs versus DBA Consultants in the future, but I prefer the Consultant dynamic more.

I’m drilling into my specializations more and more as a Consultant which are performance tuning and replication. There are a lot of good resources out there for learning performance tuning. I mainly learned from Brent Ozar who is an incredibly talented and respected entity in the SQL Server community. Replication on the other hand, I found, is learned more through osmosis. More on this in another post…

As you may or may not know, your workload as a DBA changes from day to day. Of course you do your best to be proactive and prevent emergencies from happening. However, when the unexpected hits, an entire business relies on you to keep their data safe, available, and performant. This is one of the many aspects that I love about this career; being that single person or team that can save the day when disaster strikes.