My Technical Writing & Database Tools
SQL Server has been my career for well over a decade. Along the way I started writing the problems down and building tools to make the job easier, and that became sqldba.blog and an open DBA toolkit.
✍️ The Writing
Practical guides, troubleshooting walkthroughs and operational runbooks, written from real production incidents, not theory.
🛠️ The Tools
An open SQL Server DBA toolkit: production-safe scripts, health checks and automation I use myself.
🤖 The AI Layer
The cherry on top. AI that reviews a full health check and surfaces the blindspots a static checklist misses.
Every production incident, performance problem, failed backup, unusual error, or successful automation project teaches something worth writing down. My technical writing lives on sqldba.blog, and it’s built around an honest idea:
I write it to help myself first.
The blog started as my own reference, the fixes, checks and lessons I’d want in front of me the next time something breaks. If it helps me at 2am, it’ll help another DBA somewhere. That’s the whole bet, and it’s why everything here is production-first: real systems, real incidents, production-safe scripts, never toy examples.
The Work Behind the Writing
For more than a decade I’ve worked as a SQL Server DBA, keeping production databases fast, available and recoverable, and dealing with the incidents that happen when they aren’t. High availability and disaster recovery, backups and restores, performance tuning, migrations, and the everyday operational reality of running databases a business depends on.
That hands-on work is where every article starts. I write about problems I’ve actually met in production, not theory, which is usually the difference between an article that helps at 2am and one that doesn’t.
🛠️ dba-tools — The Toolkit Behind the Blog
The second half of the writing is the tooling. dba-tools is my open SQL Server toolkit on GitHub. It’s the scripts I actually run: production-safe T-SQL for diagnostics and health checks, PowerShell automation, and a full server healthcheck that collects everything a DBA would want to look at in one pass.
It’s free, open, and built to the standard I hold at work: safe to run on production, readable enough to review before you do, and useful on its own with nothing else installed.
🤖 The Cherry on Top: AI
The scripts stand on their own. That production value is the floor. The AI layer is what sits on top: the healthcheck applies a rules engine to everything it collected, then generates an AI prompt to review the results. No API keys, no external services. Run it through whatever AI your business already allows, straight from your IDE.
That’s what surfaces the blindspots a static checklist misses, the “this job reports success but hasn’t actually backed anything up in a month” kind of finding. Solid tooling underneath, AI on top: that’s where database work is heading, and a growing amount of what I write documents the journey.
What You’ll Find
- SQL Server performance diagnostics and troubleshooting
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery (Always On, Failover Clusters, Mirroring)
- Backup, restore and recovery strategies
- Windows Server administration for database platforms
- Production-safe T-SQL scripts and DBA tooling
- Monitoring, alerting and operational health checks
- Automation with PowerShell and modern engineering workflows
- Practical uses of AI to catch problems sooner
Many articles begin with an issue I’ve hit in production, explain the investigation, and then walk through the solution with enough detail that another engineer can confidently repeat the process.
Why I Write
I’ve been building websites since 2017, and the honest answer is that the writing was always for me first. It forces me to organise my thinking, keeps a searchable record of every solution, and makes me better at the job. The goal was always for it to be a resource DBAs can lean on, and the way it gets there is by genuinely helping me day to day. If one article saves someone an hour of troubleshooting, or prevents an outage altogether, it’s done exactly what it was built for.
Explore the blog
The latest articles, production scripts and SQL Server resources, for DBAs, SREs, systems engineers, and anyone learning SQL Server.