Summary
Database reliability engineer with over two decades of production SQL Server experience across enterprise, government, and SaaS environments. I specialize in high-availability architecture, performance engineering, and infrastructure automation. I have managed estates ranging from a handful of instances to 250+ SQL Server instances with 3,600 databases, and have executed zero-downtime migrations from on-premises to Azure. I write about database engineering at sqlserverscience.com, where I have published over 200 technical articles.
Experience
- Personally responsible for 24/7/365 database reliability supporting multiple customer-facing applications for a provincial land titles and personal property registry.
- Architected and executed migration of the SQL Server database estate from on-premises to Azure VM infrastructure using Distributed Availability Groups, achieving zero downtime and zero data loss.
- Designed and executed a SQL Server 2017 to 2019 upgrade across the full HA/DR topology with cross-data-center Distributed Availability Groups and zero downtime.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines for database code using Azure DevOps with automated deployments to development and manual approval gates for UAT and production.
- Introduced Jira-based workflow management and Bitbucket Git source control for the database team.
- Built operational tooling for automated monitoring, security auditing, and infrastructure configuration management.
- Designed and built Azure Data Factory pipelines for ingesting JSON-based data into an Azure SQL Database data warehouse.
- Built a C# application consuming REST APIs and persisting data to Azure Blob Storage.
- Developed Power BI reporting connected to the Azure data warehouse.
- Managed security, reliability, and performance across 250 SQL Server instances with over 3,600 databases, spanning five development environments.
- Built internal productivity tools that automated previously labor-intensive DBA operations, significantly increasing team throughput.
- Executed cross-version upgrades from SQL Server 2000, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 to SQL Server 2017 and 2019.
Earlier Career
Redesigned line-of-business reporting for 10x performance improvement. Optimized startup and memory footprint for instances with 10,000+ databases each.
Full-stack DBA and .NET developer. Designed SQL Server databases, built a real-time hotel reservation system integrated with the Sabre GDS, and maintained 24/7 uptime for customer-facing web applications.
Designed and built database applications for corporate and government clients, including intake processing and centralized reporting systems for social services organizations.
Built data systems for diverse clients. Designed serial-based SCADA integration controlling industrial PLCs with real-time data acquisition and reporting.
Technical Skills
SQL Server
- T-SQL development and optimization
- Execution plan analysis
- Extended Events and DMVs
- SSRS and SSIS
- CLR modules
- SQL Server on Linux (RHEL)
HA/DR and Architecture
- Availability Groups
- Distributed Availability Groups
- Windows Server Failover Clustering
- Database design and normalization
- Index optimization and tuning
Cloud and DevOps
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure VMs and Managed Identity
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure DevOps CI/CD
- Git, Bitbucket, GitHub
Development
- C# / .NET
- PowerShell
- Python
- REST APIs
- WordPress and web infrastructure
Infrastructure
- Nginx configuration and security
- IIS administration
- Hyper-V and VMware
- Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu)
- Hardware evaluation and builds
AI and Automation
- AI-assisted development workflows
- GitHub Copilot CLI
- Automated infrastructure management
- WordPress REST API automation
- Image pipeline automation
Community and Publications
SQL Server Science
Author and publisher of over 200 technical articles on SQL Server performance, internals, security, and operations. Topics range from execution plan analysis and index optimization to AI-assisted database administration and infrastructure automation. Self-hosted on personally managed infrastructure with nginx security hardening, fail2ban intrusion prevention, and automated deployment pipelines.
Stack Exchange DBA
Elected moderator and top-10 all-time contributor on the Database Administrators Stack Exchange, providing expert guidance on SQL Server to the global DBA community.
Open Source
Active contributor on GitHub. Projects include database tooling, blog infrastructure automation, and upstream contributions to open-source projects.
Selected Projects
Cross-platform desktop application for real-time monitoring and management of SQL Server Availability Groups and Distributed Availability Groups. C# / Avalonia UI.
TLS certificate inspector for SQL Server that displays certificate details without requiring authentication. Also tests Kerberos connectivity. C# / .NET.
Reusable AI agent prompts for static code security assessments. A template for using AI coding agents to perform structured security reviews.
NTFS Alternate Data Streams identifier. Security and forensics utility for discovering hidden data streams attached to files. VB.NET.
pg-extract-schema, pg-deploy, and pg-data-comparer. A trio of cross-platform CLI tools for PostgreSQL schema extraction, incremental deployment script generation, and table data comparison. C# / .NET.
Free, open-source SQL Server performance monitoring by Erik Darling Data. Full Edition (server-installed, 30 collectors) and Lite Edition (standalone, DuckDB). Includes a built-in MCP server for AI agent integration. C# / .NET.
SQL Server execution plan analyzer by Erik Darling Data with cross-platform CLI and desktop GUI. C# / .NET.
Certifications
- Azure Microsoft Certified Azure Database Administrator Associate
- Azure Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals