About
I live in Nashville, TN with my lovely wife Susan and my fast-growing daughter Olivia, who is about to celebrate her first birthday in December of 2008.
Like most DBAs, I wasn’t a DBA in the beginning. No, I was a dead-set on being a police officer. From the age of about 13, I knew that was the career choice of my destiny, despite the fact that I was obviously a super computer geek. My grandfather (yeah, my grandfather) made sure that we had exposure to computers as soon as I could, having my parents pick up the Apple IIe from his office every weekend.
From my grandfather, uncle and father, I was quickly exposed to text adventure games, diskette based trade magazines and BASIC programming. My grandfather stayed primarily on the Apple side of the house, but carried both for a while. My house soon migrated to the DOS / Windows route, starting with a Compaq portable (that weighed more than I did) and slowly making our way through 386 and 486.
Fast-forwarding a number of years - I get out of college with my Criminal Justice degree and over the course of the next three or four years, I find that I wasn’t so sure about that law enforcement gig afterall. Instead I fall back to the foundation that had been built over the previous 20 years - the foundation I swore to my friends and family I’d never work with.
I headed back to my job in the mall, dove deep into self-study and pulled out a stack of certifications 8 months later. I shopped around, got my foot in some doors and eventually I’ve become a SQL DBA. It’s been a growing experience, and I’ve gotten some amazingly lucky breaks along the way. Plenty of people have had my best interest in mind, and I was clueless all the while.
During the 2008 SQL PASS Conference in Seattle, I realized I had been missing out on a huge portion of this job - the community. I had been so focused on me and my job that I had completely overlooked the fact that there is a huge, vibrant community of DBAs buzzing around, helping each other. Sure - I saw them in Google searches, but I never hung around longer than I needed to get my error resolved. Now, though, I want to be a part of that community - make those contacts and friendships.
