Database administrator by day…
I’m a domain expert for Quest Software. Previous to that, I’ve worked for Southern Wine & Spirits and for UniFocus. I’ve done SAN administration, VMware implementations, and software architecture, so I’ve been involved with all kinds of aspects of databases. I’ve done everything from the hardware architectures to stored procedure tuning to index analysis.
To me, database management is the best thing in the computer industry. I get genuinely excited about databases, queries, writing stored procedures, and doing performance tuning.
My favorite part of database administration is sharing the knowledge. If you’ve got a SQL Server question or challenge, ping me and I’ll see what I can do to help. Helping is the key to a being a successful DBA. I help executives find answers to tough business questions, like which customers to focus on, which items to promote, which salespeople are doing better than others, and where trends are going. I help developers be superheros by making their code faster, helping them track down bugs, and giving them tools to do things they hadn’t thought possible. I like database administration more than programming because I have tons of data at my fingertips, and I can juggle it to find interesting parts.
Going to work for Quest was the perfect fit for me because instead of helping one company with their database challenges, now I can help lots of database administrators at lots of companies.
Traveling geek by night…
I do a lot of traveling with my wonderful live-in girlfriend, Erika, who doesn’t seem to mind that I break everything I touch. She puts up with my misguided attempts to build, repair, and cook. I’ve got a set of travel pages up that cover where we’ve been and my advice on travel in general.
I’ve got information about red-eared slider turtles online because when we first got ours in Chinatown NYC, we had no idea what they really were or how big they’d grow. I no longer have my turtles - they’re a heck of a challenge. They grow like crazy and they can pollute a fishtank like nobody’s business. Instead, we settled on a little dog from the pound, Ernestina.
I use an online service called Flickr to store my photos and share them with you, my faithful reader. Check out my photos on Flickr.
All because of a wonderful family…
A few years ago, I gave my Dad, Mom, and Caryl (my stepmom) online presents for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. I built little web pages talking about what they’d done to help bring me up right. You can click on each of their names for more lovey-dovey info.
