Tradney's Blog

Linchpin People, LLC is an organization led by Brian Moran and Andy Leonard with Mike Walsh and Robert Pearl as Partners.  For those who do not know about Linchpin, they are a technology company with a focus on the Microsoft Database stack on the front, but behind the scene they are about developing people.  The company values are called the Service 22:40 which is modeled after Matthew (22:37-40).  This is what some call the “Golden Rule”

This is where I fit in.  First I get to be mentored by these wonderful guys, but more importantly I get to keep giving back to the community in more ways.  I recently started a small consulting firm to be able to focus on helping small to mid size companies that need the expertise of a senior level database professional.  The focus of my company is to baseline the organization, standardize installations, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, high availability, tune and get the systems running like they should.  I train the accidental dba who is responsible for the environment and then hopefully land a maintenance contract with the company to do periodic health checks.

My primary responsibility will remain focused on the large corporation where I am currently employed.  Being a DBA typically means “Doing Business After-hours” and any contracts I get with Radney Consulting or affiliation with Linchpin will typically fall into a night and weekend endeavor.  I can’t go repartioning a disk, creating a bunch of indexes, reconfiguring tempdb, or rearranging data and log files during business hours on a production system now can I?

I am very excited to be joining my friends in helping them build a great company and having a far greater reach to enrich others lives by sharing my life lessons and SQL knowledge with others.

Linchpin People = ”Changing one career at a time”

I attended my first SQL Skills event in December 2011.  Due to a big project at work I was able to work in week three of the Immersion Events which is HA/DR “High Availability and Disaster Recovery”.  Although I am taking the training out of sequence my hope is to be able to attend IE2 later this fall.  IE2 is the performance tuning session.

Expectations are high when you attend an Immersion Event.  Many will argue that it is the best training available.  I haven’t attended every possible training out there but I have attended training from the numerous “training centers”, attended a lot of SQL Saturday’s and three PASS Summits.  Of all the training I have attended, the Immersion Events are the best.

Anytime that you put Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Joe Sack and Jonathan Kehayias in the same room talking about topics they love you are in for a treat.  I will tell you that topics range from consolidation, virtualization, backups, restores, clustering, mirroring, replication, design options and more.  The fact you can find this information at SQL Skills I don’t mind sharing it.

For me, each day I was able to learn something pretty significant that will have direct impact at work, thus each day the cost of the training was justified.  How cool is that.

Thursday night at these events are community night.  Several attendees get to present a 15 minute session.  I was fortunate to be able to be one of those.  I presented “Getting Involved and Getting Ahead”, my session was on all things SQL Community.

If you ever have a change to attend, you are well feed both physically and intellectually.  Don’t miss the chance to get immersed in SQL Server.

On March 9th a tweet went out by David Fargo announcing the 2012 Idera ACE’s and my twitter handle was included in the list.  http://bit.ly/ABedR0  March 9th could also be deemed the day twitter blew up my iPhone.  The congratulations from the SQL Community was truly amazing.

The Idera ACE program is something that has interested me since Idera began the program.  Idera ACE’s are “Advisors & Community Educators for SQL Server” and Idera helps promote the ACE’s by sponsoring their travel to a number of SQL Server events.  You can read all about the program and meet your current ACE’s HERE.

Six of us were chosen from a great deal of applicants.  I can only imagine how difficult the selection process had to me and I count my blessings that my name got stuck to one of the other new ACE’s applications and got counted in the mix.  I am proud to be a part of the 2012 ACE program and join Jason Strate, Christina Leo, Jack Corbett, DB Argenis and Ben Nevarez.