Every blog must have a “lets get started” post, so I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself, how I got to work in large scale-out SQL server environments, introduce SQL Farms and… maybe more.

I live in a Washington DC. Dupont Circle to be exact. In my apartment you will find a good size TV (not sure why… never have time to watch it…), a Harman Kardon sounds system (strongly recommended), and… a rack of servers running over 200 SQL Server instances. Yes. I am a certified nerd. And proud of it. From early dawn till late night hours I live and breath SQL Server. Having a rack and a cooling system at home is excellent for hot summer days, when it snows out, or at any other time when one is too lazy to go to the office.

Before SQL Farms, I worked as a database architect in the largest data center in Symantec. Tracking back a little… I started working with SQL Server in the late 90s. Did some work with 6.5 and 7, however dove in much more seriously in early 2000. My friends have just started a small company by the name of Riptech and were looking for help with SQL Server. Riptech was the first company to define the managed security services (MSS) space. To date, over 5 years after the Symantec acquisition, the data center we built there remains by far the leader in MSS. We started by loading information from customer networks to our databases. One customer… two customers… quickly became hundreds. In view of the load and the increasing volume of data we started utilizing more SQL Servers. Today it is known as “scaling-out”.

Symantec picked us up in 2002. My dear friend and the founder of Riptech, Amit Yoran, left the company to become the cyber-zar - the head of the cyber security division at DHS. Other friends (including myself) stayed in Symantec to continue building the vision. With Symantec’s sales force, we quickly had customers with thousands of firewalls in their networks. For us - this meant that we were sometimes loading over 1TB of customer data per database per day. As a result, we quickly had to become experts in both scale-out and scale-up related issues.

The data center is still running today and is loading more and more data daily. When we left in 2005, the data center was running very efficiently with minimal issues. This was pretty challenging in view of the fact that thousands of web-users can see and filter/search rows and records in real-time, from VLDB tables containing hundreds of millions to billions of rows. This probably sounds easy when talking about data warehouses. But unlike warehouses (which completely operate offline and performance is hardly an issue) - try doing it with relational databases when you have the CIO of a fortune 500 company on the other end of phone, complaining that row-mining takes more than 3 seconds…

Anyways… I’m starting to loose focus… To make a long story short, whether we liked it or not, we had to become proficient with pretty much every bit and piece of SQL Server in order to ensure that the data center works well. We gained tons of hands-on experience with issues that Microsoft customer support never knew about. After 7 years of working in such large data centers, we decided to build SQL Farms in order to help companies that utilize many SQL Servers with turn-key or agile solutions to handle common large-scale issues.

So… without further a due, let get this blog started…