Writing & Open Source

sqldba.blog is the SQL Server operations reference I write: over 500 posts organised around what a DBA needs in the middle of an incident, with libraries for error numbers and wait types and a script for most jobs.

dba-tools is the open-source toolkit behind it. More than 180 SQL scripts with PowerShell wrappers, a health check that collects a server’s diagnostics for an AI-assisted review, and an MCP server that lets AI assistants look up errors, wait types and build levels in a hand-verified reference.

GoDaddy

Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Database Services
Apr 2025 – Present

Full technical ownership of the web hosting SQL Servers: more than 100,000 databases globally, all on Web edition. Alongside that I work on the corporate estate, the multi-terabyte databases behind the front-of-site services. Those run on SAN with failover cluster instances and availability groups, and we optimise and rebuild them when needed.

Day to day I maintain both environments, handle new requests, and work with the storage, networking, identity services and Microsoft common services teams, and most of all developers. I’m primary on call one week in four and the team’s only Europe-based engineer. I train two engineers on the team, and I’m its advocate for AI, improving our internal AI tooling and the automation around hosting.

• Hosting migration. Leading the move of the web hosting SQL Servers to optimised hosting, currently 50+ servers worldwide. Replaced all of the build and migration scripts.
• Backups. Helped migrate backups to S3 this year, owning parts of the move, and supported the migration to Ceph, working with the Storage team on performance, scrubbing schedules and capacity. Backup reliability is treated as a tier-0 risk.
• Patching. Own monthly MSSQL patching and OS compliance. Around 85% of servers now patch through automated Puppet and PaaS workflows, taking the SLA from 30 days to about 8. Built the Grafana dashboards for compliance, upgrade trajectory and on-call.
• Security. Rolled out new SQL permission roles for consistency and customer self-service, produced the architecture diagrams, threat models and certification artefacts for the tier-0 cluster and availability group environments, and worked on network segmentation to strengthen security posture.
• Failovers. Redesigned the monthly failovers and node blips into a repeatable, well-communicated process that no longer depends on datacentre swings, and trained the team to run it.
• Legacy platforms. Supported and led the move off SSIS 2014 and older Windows Server and MSSQL versions.

Site Reliability Engineer – Database Services
Aug 2021 – Mar 2025

Joined Database Services to support and engineer SQL Server, MySQL and NoSQL for teams around the world. The work covered high availability (failover cluster instances, availability groups, mirroring), replication, CDC and partitioning, along with backups, security and estate monitoring. I led reliability initiatives for SQL Server, automated test restores so that business-critical backups were proven and not assumed, drove the team’s monitoring and alerting improvements, and took my turn on call for critical incidents. I also spent a year supporting Teradata and had six months of MySQL training.

People’s Postcode Lottery

Database & System Administrator
Oct 2017 – Oct 2021

Looked after the data platform and the legacy data systems, helping keep them secure, compliant, stable and fast, and owning the incidents on them. Projects included delivering phase 1 of a new AWS data platform, moving the BI stack to AWS, bringing in Tableau, and building the retention, anonymisation and data selection history components ahead of GDPR in 2018. Alongside that I built and ran the ETL workloads, produced security audit reports and agreed permissions with department managers, worked with Data Governance on GDPR and security measures, and helped the Insight and Campaigns teams automate their SQL.