“Oh, hi, don’t mind us – we’re just having a little conversation about SQL Server. I’m so glad you can join us. There are seats up front here...” That was the first time I ever heard words from Buck Woody directed at me. It was my first time attending one of his sessions at the then-named SQL PASS Summit. I don’t think I was an MVP yet, but I was a blogger and knew a lot of the folks in the room who turned to chuckle along with (at?) me. We had spoken thankfully after that session, and since then, he has become a friend and a mentor at times. I’ve stayed at his house and hired his son-in-law, who is a fantastic data developer on our team.
We’ve discussed a “what if” idea off and on for a while now, and the time was right to move it from imagination to action. I’ve pinched myself a few times to make sure this is really happening before clicking Publish on this post. It is happening, as Buck talked about in his LinkedIn Post.
Buck and I will probably do a video or even a Q&A at some point once he’s out of his break between roles time and officially on the team in November, but why not talk a bit about the change now?
Why This Move? Why Now?
For almost 15 years, Straight Path has been the DBA team behind numerous organizations, currently supporting over 100 companies that rely on our DBA as a Service offering – many for as long as we’ve been providing the service. Large publicly traded companies, small mom-and-pop software-as-a-service shops, all look to our team as their Database Advocates. Their data advocates.
We’ve owned the operational side of the data story – performance, reliability, security, and availability. It’s a role I’m proud of. It’s what we’re built for. It’s what we’ve hired for with the leaders in this space, we’re blessed to work with.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a shift. Increasingly, our clients aren’t just asking, “Is my database healthy?” They’re asking bigger questions:
- What’s the right cloud for our next five years?
- Is AI something we should actually prepare for or just a buzzword?
- How do we secure all of these feeds?
- Can we be multi-platform?
- We have data everywhere — SQL Server, Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, Big-DB — how do we get our arms around it?
- The words keep changing – data lakemart house estates?! What do we do about that?
- Who should “own” our data overall?
These aren’t “DBA” questions anymore. They’re data leadership questions. And that’s where Buck comes in. That’s where CDO as a Service comes in. It’s where Data architecture as a Service comes in.
Introducing Buck Woody – Chief Data Officer (CDO) at Straight Path
Buck is joining us as Straight Path’s Chief Data Officer. We are a DBA as a Service company, we are a SQL Server company. I like to think of us as a “hospitality company” that happens to work with data. But we’re also a data company. We have our own proprietary proactive dashboard. The monitoring tool that we are building and the data it collects (more about that in 2026 😉 ) include the data collected by our “sp_check*” scripts. We have our own reports – we have data, and we want to and need to organize it best. Buck is starting by asking us tough questions and running through his data strategy with us as we tweak and finalize the processes we have discussed.
He brings decades of data leadership experience — from SQL Server and Azure to AI and data science, as well as teaching and mentoring at the University of Washington. But more than that, he’s bringing a philosophy I believe in: that the best leaders are lifelong students.
I’ll let him explain a bit of what we’re building together, excerpted from a video we shared with the team at our recent on-site meeting:
What We’re Building – CDO as a Service
Our next chapter is about helping organizations make sense of their data—across clouds, platforms, and departments, and into the AI story.
This new service will help our clients:
- Understand what data they have and where it lives.
- Audit the data architecture for security, compliance, and risk.
- Make wise, independent choices about cloud, platform, and AI adoption.
- Prepare their data estate for the future with practical, vendor-neutral guidance.
It’s not a buzzword play. It’s not “quick, let’s have an AI story!” It’s the same Straight Path philosophy that’s guided us since day one: do the right thing, tell the truth, live our values, and help clients think of their data first.
We’re not becoming an ETL shop or an analytics consultancy. We’re still the relational DBA team —the people who live and breathe database health, backups, and uptime, making data faster and more resilient. But with Buck joining, we’re adding a strategic layer that helps clients see the whole data picture.
We won’t be all things to all people. Buck and I have discussed how well this service complements the DBA services, and how the DBA services and the monitoring tool we are developing will “organically” expand over time, beyond just SQL Server. We want to protect the data, help make sure the strategies are full proof (and fool proof) – and we want to help companies untangle the insane web that the data space is turning into. When clients are ready to implement and build, we will have our partner network ready, including ETL specialists, analytics experts, warehouse designers, and experts in the systems that make sense for each client, all queued up. And we won’t just be “set it and forget it” about it – we’ll ensure the solutions are what are needed. We’ll be there to watch the implementation come together, instead of riding off into the sunset to the next client. We have a lot of work and building ahead of us. We’ve already had some informal chats with our own customers, and we have a lot of exploring to do with our own data here at Straight Path, as well as working through the offerings that Buck and I will be building with some existing clients. And we’ll keep you all posted along the way.
Welcome aboard (soon), Buck. Enjoy your time between things – and let’s get to work in a few weeks. I’ll try to be on time for every meeting you have with me – I think I turned pretty red at that session at PASS – but it was well worth it for the fun and learning I had.
