I started my IT career twenty years ago as a VB and C developer, wandered into C++ for a bit, had one never-to-be-repeated foray into assembler on a VAX something-or-another, and then found myself one day that most sorrowful of creatures, the Accidental DBA.

It was SQL Server 2000, serving as the back end of a Point-Of-Sale system being developed in-house by a manufacturing firm for their corporate stores. I struggled mightily to keep that thing afloat: truncating the log file, shrinking the database files, putting indexes on every column in sight, all the many things that many novice DBA’s, in their well-intentioned ignorance, do day in and day out.

A few years later, I was downsized, then hired as a SQL developer by a financial firm in the Midwest. I was surrounded there by some very smart people, including one bona fide SQL Server MVP, and quickly understood that 1) I knew absolutely nothing about SQL Server, and 2) I’d better start picking it up. Thus began my education…

After eight years as a database developer, I’ve started taking on more traditionally administrative tasks: monitoring, tuning, optimizing, at the server and database level alike, code and structures and machines and all. This blog is about that transition, about sharing all I’ve learned and all I will be learning, in the same spirit that colleagues once shared their knowledge with me.

So…let’s see what adventures await us today…