If you’ve ever wondered who’s behind the SQL rants and PowerShell one-liners — you’ve found the right page.

Who I Am

I’m Garland, a Database Administrator based in the Duluth area. I’ve been working in IT since 1999, which means I’ve survived Y2K, the cloud hype cycle, and at least three “SQL is dead” think pieces.

A Colorado native by birth, I’ve since been relocated by career opportunities (and the insane cost of living in Colorado, thank you Californians) to places that do not have mountains — a situation I maintain is temporary, despite all evidence to the contrary. My career has taken me from Boulder to the Tulsa area, back to the Denver area, and eventually to the upper Midwest, where the internet is surprisingly decent and the winters are not. Along the way, I earned a degree in Software Engineering and a graduate specialization in Enterprise Software Architecture from Capella University — which is a fancy way of saying I spent a lot of time thinking about how large, distributed systems fall apart and how to stop them from doing that.

I started in the trenches: Systems Administrator, Linux Administrator, and AS/400 admin and DBA — back when “the mainframe is dead” was the hot take. In 2014 I made the move to full-time SQL Server DBA and never looked back.

Today I work as a DBA, where the job has expanded well beyond SQL Server. I now work across PostgreSQL, MySQL, and a touch of Oracle — database engines running on bare metal, VMs, in the cloud, and increasingly in Kubernetes. I’m also applying DevOps practices to the DBA role wherever I can find the opening: automating the repeatable, version-controlling the manual, and generally trying to make future-me less annoyed at past-me.

What I Do

My day job spans SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and the occasional Oracle instance — database engines on bare metal, VMs, cloud, and now Kubernetes. The work itself is the usual DBA stack: performance tuning, index optimization, backup strategies, query analysis. But the part I find most interesting is the automation layer. I lean heavily on PowerShell and dbatools to handle the repeatable work, and I’m increasingly bringing DevOps practices into the DBA role — CI/CD for schema changes, infrastructure as code, pipeline-driven deployments — wherever the organization will let me.

I’m an active member of PASS — the Professional Association for SQL Server.

Outside the server room, I volunteer as an EMT with a local ambulance service. It turns out that staying calm during a production incident is excellent training for pre-hospital medicine, and vice versa.

What I’m Exploring

The DBA role doesn’t sit still, and neither do I. Right now I’m spending time on:

• HomeLab — building and breaking things in a self-hosted environment before they have a chance to break in production
• Databases in Kubernetes — evaluating what it actually takes to run stateful workloads in a cluster
• AI experimentation — figuring out where AI tooling genuinely helps database and infrastructure work, and where it confidently hallucinates an index that doesn’t exist

Why This Blog

I started sqlmac.com because I kept solving the same problems twice — once in the dark at 2 a.m., and once again when I’d forgotten what I did. Writing things down turned out to be a reasonable solution.

This blog is for IT professionals of all stripes: DBAs, developers, sysadmins, and DevOps engineers who want practical, opinionated content over documentation mirrors. If you’ve ever Googled a SQL Server error and landed on a forum post that was “SOLVED” with no explanation of how — this blog is the antidote.

Expect real examples, honest caveats, and the occasional confession that yes, I’ve also done that thing you’re not supposed to do.

Key Takeaways

• 25+ years in IT: SysAdmin → Linux Admin → AS/400 DBA → SQL Server DBA (2014) → multi-engine DBA at LeadVenture
• Works across SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle — bare metal, VMs, cloud, and Kubernetes
• Applying DevOps practices to the DBA role: automation, CI/CD for schema changes, infrastructure as code
• Heavy user of PowerShell and dbatools; PASS member, volunteer EMT
• Writing for broad IT professionals: practical, opinionated, no fluff