Last Updated on April 15, 2013 by John Morehouse

Whew!!  It’s been a crazy couple of months!

  • My son Simon, was born 8 weeks early on February 10, 2013.  Both he and my wife are doing fantastically well.
  • Planning & executing SQL Saturday #197 for April 6th, 2013 went off without any major hitches and it turned out GREAT!
  • I start a new position within my company officially today, Monday April 15th.

Yup, in the midst’s of dealing with a premature baby and helping to organize another SQL Saturday event for Omaha, I applied for a Database Architect/Engineer position within my company, Farm Credit Services of America.

What does this mean exactly?

Well, for the most part it means that I’m going back to providing production database support.  I’ll also be helping with database migration, performance tuning, various database projects, process improvement, standards and assist with other teams with database related issue whenever they might need help.

Since July 2010,  I’ve been a member of Team Ziko (named after a Hero Rat) where I served as their Database Developer.  I was basically a database code jockey and I loved the team.  However, fate had a way of showing me another path.

In 2012, our organization was dealt a blow in the form of corruption of a database.  As luck would have it, we had an ongoing relationship with the SQL Skills folks and I had some free cycles so I volunteered to help out where ever I could.  Myself and another colleague, Scott, had the chance to work directly with Paul Randal (B|T) & Jonathan Kehayias (B|T) on the issue.  I loved every minute of it.  I know, I know.  It was very bad that we had corruption and data loss, but it’s like being a volunteer fire fighter.  Someone has to have an emergency for me to have fun.

Anyway, turns out, when it was all said and done, I was hooked.  Even more so than before.  I was hooked on the internals.  So much that I put together a presentation for a conference and spent a Saturday night digging through DBCC PAGE.

Yup, a Saturday night.  My wife thought that I was crazy.  10:30PM on a Saturday night, I’m at my computer with head phones on giddy like a school girl because it was making sense.  It was then that I realized that as much as I loved my team, doing what I would call true database administration was my calling.  I wanted more of the corruption, more of the log shipping/replication/mirroring, performance tuning, more everything.  MOAR DBANESS!

So when a position opened up, I decided that I had to follow my addiction.   Now several weeks later, I’m very happy to report that today will be my first day as a Database Architect/Engineer!

I’m excited to see what fate has in store for me next!!

© 2013, John Morehouse. All rights reserved.

18 Replies to “A New Challenge!”

  1. Thanks Kimberly!! I loved worked with your team and frankly, it’s what helped spark that awareness of where I wanted to go, so thank you!!

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