Brent Ozar: SQL Server DBA, SAN Storage, and VMware Consultant in Chicago

We each have our own deep specialties – mine are the SQL Server engine, storage (SANs, SSDs, DAS, etc), and virtualization – but we all approach engagements the same way. We use our years of experience to rapidly assess the problem, then leverage our unique communications skills to get everybody onto the same page on what needs to be done to move forward. All we do is solve the toughest problems over and over, living on the edge of troubleshooting and planning. We knock out problems that have been challenging your staff for months, and we have fun while we do it.

When we’re not consulting, we’re learning about new tools and sharing our knowledge with the community. You’ll find us teaching at conferences, showing up in recommended reading lists, and in your Google results.

I’d worked with Quest’s marketing team on a few whitepapers and webcasts while I was a DBA, and they must have liked what they’d seen.  I was completely surprised when I told them I was looking for a new position, and they offered me a job as an evangelist.

I spoke at events around the world including the PASS Summit in Seattle, SQLBits in the UK, PASSCamp in Germany, and many more. My sessions won awards including back-to-back Best of PASS Summit and the Microsoft MVP award. My favorite sessions help bridge gaps: I taught database professionals about things that influence SQL Server reliability and performance, like virtualization, storage, programming, and hardware.

I’d always wanted to see my name on Amazon.com, so I wrote a couple of chapters in Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. I now have enormous respect for repeat authors: this was a much more difficult task than I’d initially expected. As of this writing, I’m proud to say that all of the Amazon reviews have given us five stars.

In early 2010, I achieved the elite Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server certification, Microsoft’s highest technical test. Most MCMs work for Microsoft – I’m one of less than a dozen in America who don’t, and even less of us are available for consulting. I came to the realization that as much as I loved my work at Quest, I had an opportunity to go start something amazing. I briefly joined SQLskills as a consultant, and then headed out on my own.

I had this vision of consulting companies: a crack team of elite hired guns who parachuted in, solved tough problems quickly with creative solutions, and then rocketed off to the next emergency. At first, I thought I was right. My team was called in to drag a data warehouse project across the finish line for Southern Wine. Their BI project had been struggling for years, and just 30 days before the due date, the entire team quit at once, leaving no documentation behind. Consultants to the rescue! We reverse engineered everything, found tons of problems, threw it away, and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. The users loved it.

Rather than rocketing off to the next emergency, I liked Southern’s team so much that I joined them full time as their data warehouse DBA. I then conquered the rest of the company’s unmanaged SQL Server instances, instituting standards and preparing them for high availability and disaster recovery.  Being in hurricane alley, we did role swaps a couple times a year, failing over our mission-critical databases to our DR datacenter and running everything there for a week.

When the company’s virtualization project failed, I stepped in to take a shot at it.  I learned the inner workings, turned the project around, and the company went almost exclusively virtual.  When the SAN admin quit, I volunteered to take his job duties for no additional salary because I wanted to learn how it worked.  I loved seeing what was inside the black box because it made me a better database administrator.

I attended my first Summit for the Professional Association for SQL Server, and I was hooked. I became active in the community, writing articles and whitepapers for anybody who’d have me, and doing presentations at my local user group. I kicked myself for not finding this earlier.

I would probably still be there today, but they had a corporate policy against telecommuting, and my girlfriend got an FAA job in Houston, TX, so we had to move back. They graciously let me telecommute until I found a new position.

Woohoo, my first real technical job! I joined a small 10-15 person team of developers and support engineers delivering hotel accounting and payroll software. My official title was Developer, but small companies have no room for people who just wear one hat. In any given week, I would be gathering requirements from customers, using my own hotel business knowledge to find edge cases, writing code, testing somebody else’s code, training our support staff and end users on the new features, and taking support escalation calls when something didn’t work. I loved the fast pace.

Our clients were growing beyond what our development platform could support, and I had a little SQL Server experience, so I started transitioning our software’s back end to a SQL Server database. I got my first certifications on SQL Server, but I didn’t have any plans to become “just” a DBA – I just wanted to be a better developer.

After a couple of years, we were acquired by a larger (80-100 person) company, UniFocus. The dot-com rush was in full swing, so I politely declined to move with the rest of the company to its new digs in Dallas. I loved my job and my coworkers, but I liked Houston even more, so I decided to stay. Luckily, the company saw enough value in me to let me telecommute full time, and even cooler, I became the manager of a handful of developers. I drove to Dallas one week per month to do whiteboarding with the rest of my team, but otherwise, I worked remotely.

When our development platform finally reached the end of the road, I had to decide whether we’d switch to Java or .NET. During my research, I realized that if I was going to be a really good developer, I’d probably be learning a new development language every 5-6 years. While I love to learn, that just didn’t call to me, and I decided to become a full time DBA. After all, ANSI SQL hasn’t changed much in decades, and I could even leap between platforms (like to Oracle or MySQL) without learning a new language – just new internals and management techniques.

For a hotel worker, I was an oddball: I knew how to make spreadsheets do slick stuff. Hotel companies relied on spreadsheets to communicate budget numbers up to the home office, so my whiz-bang budget spreadsheets caught the attention of my regional managers. I was promoted up to Budget Analyst and Network Administrator for Lane Hospitality, a firm with a couple dozen hotels at the time. When my favorite regional manager jumped ship to Wright Investments, a competing hotel company, I was lucky to have him invite me along for the ride.

I maintained a few dozen computers and a handful of servers (including my first SQL Server) at the home office in Memphis, plus traveled around the country setting up computers and networks at each of our hotels. Since I’d also come up the ranks doing accounting and management, I trained the accounting staff as I went. I wrote the company’s accounting manual, and even became the internal auditor.

It’s funny – the auditing experience helped me become who I am today. I had to walk into a business environment I’d never seen before, rapidly assess their practices and health, and write up a report. I couldn’t just take potshots, either: I had to methodically prove my findings, and I had to deliver them in a way that would help the hotel get better. The report went up the chain to executives, and hotel GMs’ bonuses were affected by my audit findings. I had to walk a delicate political line, pointing out flaws without throwing people under the bus, and building a consensus. It’s exactly what I do today as an IT consultant!

We used accounting and payroll software from an outside vendor, and their solution transmitted data over PCAnywhere via dialup lines. As a network administrator, I hated having to maintain an army of dilapidated computers with 56k modems, so I rigged up my own solution to FTP the numbers in from each hotel. I was able to cut a bunch of phone lines and computers, eliminate long distance costs, and get the numbers in reliably every morning.  The vendor took notice, and when I tired of the traveling life, they hired me.

After leaving college, I fell back on the hospitality industry knowledge I’d gained in my high school jobs. I aimed to become a hotel general manager, then busted my tail to make it happen.

I made it – if you can call managing distressed 150-200 room hotels “making it” – but I came to an ugly realization. Hotel work means relying on the dedication of an army of minimum-wage workers who are constantly churning through the organization. It’s all about training: making sure every front desk clerk, every housekeeper, and every maintenance man always has the know-how to keep guests satisfied. However, nobody wants to be in the service industry forever, so the GM is constantly managing the hiring, training, and motivation of the staff, all of whom wants to move somewhere else.

While I loved the work, I wanted to be somewhere with longer-term potential, so I started moving up the ranks of hotel management companies.

After graduating high school in Michigan, I wanted to move as far away from snow as I could. Being a National Merit Finalist, I could pick pretty much any college I wanted, and the business school at U of H really appealed to me. They had acres of desktops connected to the Internet, thousands of on-campus students, and a friendly Honors College staff. I wanted to major in Accounting or Economics, go over to the newly developing Russian business frontier, and make a fortune.

I left after just three semesters, bored out of my gourd. I couldn’t relate the theoretical class stuff back to practical real-world use. What’s the point of calculus for an accounting student?

That weakness stays with me today, and I’ve turned it into a strength. When I give training sessions, every single piece of information has to be applicable to real-world use. IT workers barely have enough time to get trained, let alone learn useless trivia. I make sure all of my presentations deliver real-world, actionable stuff, and I give attendees a list of things to do when they get back to the office.