Year Six

Disclaimer:
I have the unfortunate luck of being hired on the same date that Tom Kyte started his blog. Honestly, I've been working on this a couple days so I'm posting it anyway, even if you think I am a copycat.

Six years ago today I started with my current company. This is the longest I've ever had the same title, although my responsibilities have changed over the years. It's also the most time I've spent at the same place.

It was the tail end of the dotCom boom and I had over 40 interviews with companies in the Tri-State area. Most of them didn't pan out, but when it came time to choose, I had three offers to consider. When I accepted this job, I took a chance because I liked the people but didn't think they had enough for me to do. I was the sole DBA for one production database that ran on an Ultra 2 (2 CPUs, 54G of disk, 512M). The telecom company I came from had three E5500's (six CPUs, 2G RAM, 600G disk). In fact, they had more than enough for me to do.

My first project at the new company was to move approximately half of the schemas in the production db to a new server. By the end of the first year, I was managing four db servers. Today, my team of three manages about a dozen db servers and almost two dozen instances. We've gone from a little six-pack of disks to a 3+TB SAN.

My second project was to setup a backup & recovery plan. Good thing, too, because about 6 months later we did a full recovery of one of our major production systems. Fortunately, we only had 3 un-planned recoveries until the blackout in August 2003. Recovered 12 databases that night.

Now MySQL and Linux are at the forefront of of my knowlege adventure. Maybe six years from now our MySQL databases will outnumber the Oracle ones...