Mike WalshMike Walsh

Mike loves mentoring clients on the right Systems or High Availability architectures because he enjoys those lightbulb moments and loves watching the right design and setup come together for a client. He started Straight Path in 2010 when he decided that after over a decade working with SQL Server in various roles, it was time to try and take his experience, passion, and knowledge to help clients of all shapes and sizes. Mike is a husband, father to four great children, and a Christian. He’s a volunteer Firefighter and EMT in his small town in New Hampshire, and when he isn’t playing with his family, solving SQL Server issues, or talking shop, it seems like he has plenty to do with his family running a small farm in NH raising Beef Cattle, Chickens, Pigs, Sheep, Goats, Honeybees and who knows what other animals have been added!

Worked fine in development…

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How many times have you heard or uttered those words? You work hard and understand the business requirements, you try and get the logic to work to make the procedure return what was expected or update the data as expected. You do some unit tests in your environment, it may not scream but it comes … Read more

A Picture That Says, “Don’t Shrink!” (and other things…)

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So I wrote a lot of posts around shrinking (Here, here, here). Some of my posts were turned into a wiki article on SQLServerPedia. I thought I was done posting about this but one more. I talked about why we shouldn’t do it on a regular basis. Why it should really be reserved for use … Read more

Documentation

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Documentation (…Or how I learned to stop procrastinating and love tolerate a chore necessary task) Do you document? Do you document well? As I told Paul Randal (twitter, blog) today on twitter, this blog post was inspired by an observation in the shower and a recent question by Brent Ozar (twitter, blog). You didn’t need … Read more

SQLServerPedia –> Do you use it?

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I was going about my own business today when I got an e-mail from Brent Ozar (twitter, blog) who is the editor-in-chief of SQLServerPedia. Apparently a wiki article that was made from my blog posts on shrinking has received the honor of being the first to receive the “Wiki of the month” recognition. Great honor … Read more

Paranoid? Control Freak? Have I got a career for you…

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The above personality traits sound like bad news. In most areas of life they certainly can be. That being said a DBA needs to have a certain aspect of these to best do their jobs. As I blogged about in “Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms“, I describe other careers where a keen eye to detail and … Read more