Principal Engineer of Oh God Why Is It Slow

☄️Existential Dread, but Make it SQL Server 💖 Emotional Support Human for Explain Plans
🌨️ Maine (born for uptime, raised by outages)

Summary

For twenty years, I have coaxed SQL Server into doing things it does not want to do: scaling under duress, performing under scrutiny, behaving during peak traffic like a well-adjusted adult. I architect cloud migrations the way medieval surgeons performed amputations: decisively, with period-appropriate screaming, and ultimately for the patient’s own good. I train engineers because no one should face query plans alone. My open-source tools are used around the world, not because they are perfect, but because the alternative is reading Microsoft documentation unassisted.

Core Skills

Cloud Migrations (Azure → AWS: the album) ✨ Query Performance Exorcism ✨ Sharding (both moral and technical) ✨ Disaster Recovery in Every Sense ✨ Cost Governance (explaining bills) ✨ Telemetry That Tells the Truth ✨ Developer Enablement (retraining the traumatized) ✨ Curriculum That Prevents Future Crimes ✨ SQL Server Internals (the bits they don’t talk about)

Experience

Staff Database Reliability Engineer 〰️ 2023+

The cloud platform was buckling like a folding chair at a family reunion.

• Piloted the migration of 100+ environments from Azure SQL MI to AWS RDS because latency is the silent killer and contractual downtime windows wait for no one.
• Reduced p95 latency nearly in half—not because I deserved joy, but because the alternative was customer churn and stern emails titled “Follow-up to previous follow-up.”
• Built automation for provisioning and lifecycle management because repeating the same manual steps expecting different results is not reliability engineering, it’s romance.
• Implemented workload isolation and secured executive approval for sharding, the architectural equivalent of moving teenagers into separate bedrooms.
• Created training, code reviews, and enablement materials that turned fear into competence and competence into fewer 2 AM pages.

Staff Technical Product Manager, Data Platform & Data Science 〰️ REDACTED 〰️ 2022-2023

Machine learning wanted to be fast; GDPR wanted to be legal.

• Tuned the Azure SQL Feature Store until ML personalization ran acceptably fast without additional cloud spend, shocking finance and delighting no one.
• Led GDPR compliance efforts, navigating regulation with the resigned grace of a homeowner discovering mold.
• Trained engineers on Snowflake migration and pretended this would be the last time.
• Founded the Data Insights Guild, which, like all guilds, existed to share knowledge and to complain.

Senior Content Developer, Azure SQL 〰️ I AWAIT YOUR CEASE AND DESIST 〰️ 2021-2022

Documented the things people wished weren’t true about performance.

• Authored Microsoft’s most-trafficked Azure SQL content because someone had to say, out loud, “Yes, it works that way on purpose.”
• Tuned CI/CD documentation workflows that shifted publishing cycles from multi-day odysseys into something approaching tolerable.
• Brokered peace between PM and engineering using the rarest artifact in Redmond: shared understanding.

Developer Advocate to Product Manager 〰️ Software, But Make it with The English 〰️ 2018-2021

Tried to convince the world that database DevOps wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

• Delivered workshops on rollback safety and deployment hygiene, a.k.a. “How not to ruin the weekend.”
• Built PoC architectures that whispered seductively: “This time deployments will go well.”
• Translated adoption barriers and competitor strategy into roadmaps because the product must evolve, even if the customers do not.

Managing Partner 〰️ Brent Ozar Unlimited 〰️ 2011-2015

The emergency room of SQL Server consulting.

• Built the SQL Critical Care consulting product, performing hundreds of engagements for databases experiencing the big one.
• Authored sp_BlitzIndex and helped build the First Responder Kit, the de facto survival pack for DBAs entering hostile territory.
• Delivered standing-room-only SQL training while wearing the calm expression of someone who has seen true query plan horror.

Training & Public Engagement

Deliver multi-day SQL performance trainings; speak at global conferences; create open-source content; bring peace to war-torn orgs through the healing power of indexing.

Education & Certifications

MA, Philosophy — which greatly prepared me for explaining performance tuning decisions
BA, Humanities — because the humanities are dying enough without your judgment
Microsoft Certified Master — SQL Server
Microsoft MVP (2012-2021) — I can quit anytime
Redgate 100 (2022) — limited edition, do not resell