I'm a DBA learning DevOps in the open. This is where I document the DBA craft, break things in the HomeLab before production can, and offer the occasional opinion from someone who's been in IT since before the cloud was a metaphor.
Day 2 of PASS Summit 2024 was a Postgres fundamentals precon for SQL Server folks, taught by Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz. Here's what stood out.
Day 1 of PASS Summit 2024 — a full-day query optimization precon with Brent Ozar covering SQL Server 2019/2022 features, ORM handling, and parameter sniffing.
Heading to PASS Data Summit 2024 for the second time — this year with a plan for networking, pacing, and not burning out as an introvert.
I deleted a Proxmox volume I definitely needed, then spent an afternoon fighting a failed v8.2 install, a RAID reconfiguration, and a stubborn unsquashfs error. Chuck was nowhere to be found.
My HomeLab started as a retired desktop running Proxmox. Then I got three free servers from a datacenter teardown. Then my inner monologue told me to rebuild everything with IaC in two weeks. It did not go as planned.
After years of moving the blog around without writing, a recalibration: this blog exists for me, not an audience. An honest take on what that actually means.
By late 2021, a combination of COVID fatigue, relocation stress, and behind-the-scenes DBA work going unnoticed had pushed the cynicism to uncomfortable levels. A year-end vent.
2021 was relentlessly busy — training a new DBA, a summer buried in projects, and a spontaneous trip to Yellowstone that made me realize how overworked I'd become.
A 2020 year-in-review written in January 2021. WFH without structure, losing a close friend, PASS shutting down, and a few wins buried under the wreckage.
Spent two days chasing a misleading SQL replication error. The fix was a missing db_owner grant on the distribution database for the Log Reader Agent account.