Kendra Little’s Resume

Microsoft Certified Master, SQL Server 2008
Speaker and Trainer
Creator of Magical Posters
Microsoft MVP

Three Recent Projects

1. Server Hardware Transplant: I designed a migration plan to move an OLTP database requiring four nines of uptime to new hardware. The plan included testing, validation, monitoring, and rollback steps. My client executed the migration flawlessly without me needing to ever touch the system.
2. Index Bypass Surgery: I showed my client the fragmentation and scalability problems of storing  hundreds of gigabytes of frequently updated data in heaps. I coded an indexing change to safely and quickly add clustered indexes with the minimum resources and most flexible change plan. My client and I tested and executed the change together, then monitored and validated application speed and health. Following the change, SQL Server saved 20% of wasted space on disk and in memory while maintaining up to 30K batch requests per second.
3. Storage Adrenaline Treatment: I sized new solid state storage and walked three clients through the process of designing and implementing non-rotational storage solutions. In each case we identified the attachment method and SSD type which best fit the system, selected the right RAID level and testing methodology, and validated performance and availability on the new storage.

Work History

Managing Director
Brent Ozar PLF, LLC, 2011-present

My job is 50% making SQL Server instances faster, more resilient, and more highly available. It’s also 50% teaching each client to tune SQL Server themselves.

I deliver practical recommendations for short, medium and long term changes. I regularly performance tune databases ranging in size from 5GB to more than 50TB, and I plan realistic changes according to business requirements and database, server, and storage capacity.

Senior Database Administrator
WildTangent Games, 2010-2011

In this position I focused on three big things which were critical to the environment:

• SQL Server performance tuning
• Bottleneck analysis
• High availability and disaster recovery

The best part of this job was working closely with developers to tune a high transaction OLTP environment where all queries were required to execute in under three seconds. We improved query design patterns, tuned indexes, and I designed and executed an isolation level change to eliminate contention in a critical application database. I also designed a Disaster Recovery plan for the SQL Server environment.

Senior Database Administrator/Operations Engineer
Microsoft Corporation, 2006-2010

At Microsoft I worked in an environment with the latest hardware and SAN storage technologies. I specialized in:

• Windows Failover Clusters
• Very Large Databases (VLDBs: 20+ instances with databases between 1-5TB in this case)
• SQL Server Database Mirroring
• SQL Server Log Shipping
• SQL Server Table Partitioning
• Virtualized SQL Server instances (VMware and Hyper-V)
• Agile software methodology

I designed and implemented hundreds of changes on critical production systems– often more than five changes per week.

As part of these changes I reduced load time to reporting servers by 70% by identifying and preventing inefficient query plans. I discovered critical bugs in load balancing for customer reports against VLDB reporting databases. I coded a monitoring solution for  high volume transactional replication.

I worked extensively with Windows Failover Clusters and SAN storage in this position. I also learned how to implement SQL Server table partitioning, and discovered how to know when it will improve performance, and when it’ll just make your life much harder.

Systems Administrator
aQuantive Corporation, 2004-2006

At aQuantive I learned to support and automate a distributed processing environment in SQL Server with hundreds of instances. My core skills were building:

• SQL Server Automation with C# and T-SQL
• SQL Server Transactional Replication
• SQL Server Maintenance
• SQL Server Enterprise Monitoring (designed in-house)

In this position I frequently I built out new SQL Server environments, generated large datasets, cleansed user-identifying data, and configured and tuned SQL Server transaction replication.

I worked with 50+ software developers distributed across 7 teams using agile development methods. I taught the developers how to diagnose and fix performance and availability issues with SQL Server in their development and test environments.

Education

MA, Philosophy: Fordham University, 2002
BA, Humanities: Shimer College, 1998