Real engagements, real environments — migrations, high availability, cloud, encryption, and performance work drawn from 365+ completed engagements.
I don't do case-study theater. What follows is a straight list of client engagements: what the environment was, what was wrong or needed, and what I did about it. Migrations off dying hardware, Always On clusters that wouldn't fail over, RDS instances drowning in their own logs, encryption projects nobody else wanted to touch.
Most of these came through Upwork, where the reviews are verified and public. If your environment looks like any of these, get in touch or schedule a call.
Selected client engagements — migrations, high availability, Azure and AWS, encryption, and performance tuning — ordered by DBA focus. Chosen from my 365+ completed engagements; I list client business names and omit individuals for privacy.
Three engagements are written up as full, step-by-step case studies: migrating 11 databases off end-of-life SQL Server 2008, retiring SQL Server 2012 — 84 databases in one quiet cutover, and tuning a struggling SQL Server on AWS RDS.
Long-term administration of a high-availability SQL Server cluster running mission-critical pharmaceutical-manufacturing databases — performance, backup, disaster recovery, security best practices, and documentation.
Continued SQL Server consulting for the client — data migrations, Always On Availability Group troubleshooting, and general DBA support.
Administered AWS RDS/EC2-based SQL Server for a client — tuning, partitioning, indexing, high availability, upgrades and patching, security/encryption, data warehousing, and documentation.
Managed and optimized MS SQL/Azure SQL for an analytics portal — API integrations such as Shopify, Azure SQL mirroring for high availability, automated data pipelines, data cleansing, SFTP import/export reporting, and Tableau connectivity.
Assessed an AWS RDS SQL Server setup for high-availability and data-loss risk and recommended an automatic-failover architecture with pricing.
Identified and optimized long-running, resource-intensive queries and indexes on MS SQL Server RDS in AWS, upgraded to SQL Server 2016, and improved query plan reuse.
Led development and performance tuning of an Azure-hosted SQL Server backing a large .NET application — architecting and optimizing complex T-SQL stored procedures and views using Query Store, execution plans and DMVs, with documentation.
Ongoing Azure PaaS SQL administration — performance tuning, execution-plan and query optimization, backups and disaster recovery, security, and data modeling.
Indexing and performance tuning of a 7-database SQL Server instance on AWS powering a dashboard platform, plus completing an SSRS report.
Implemented full-text search and optimized queries on million-record SQL Server databases, built an auto-import of text files into catalog tables, and optimized stored procedures for web performance.
Part-time SQL Server DBA — created scheduled archive/purge and re-index jobs, performance-tuned tables and stored procedures, and improved management reporting.
Reviewed a SQL Server 2014 environment for performance (large log/tempdb files, high fragmentation) and set up maintenance jobs to restore optimal speed.
Migrated 11 databases (~300 GB) from SQL Server 2008 Web to 2017 Web on new hardware — two-host best-practice config, backups, log shipping with failover/failback instructions, reduced-downtime cutover, and post-migration query tuning.
Reviewed a non-profit's SQL Server setup (performance, security, governance), assisted migrating the main database to Azure, and supported ongoing reporting on Power BI and SSRS.
Optimized databases, stored procedures, jobs and permissions and migrated a medical-device manufacturer's ERP/MES from on-prem SQL Server 2008 SP1 Enterprise to SQL Server 2019, in phases.
Migrated a C#/.NET app and its SQL Server database off an aging AWS Windows Server 2008 R2 instance to a new AMI, reconfiguring IIS/SQL while preserving the static IP, URL and SSL certificate.
Migrated a SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services database to SQL Server 2017, resolving an attach/detach URL-mismatch error.
Set up and optimized a new multi-tenant SQL Server (moving off AWS) — maintenance/backup/log tasks, table partitioning and change tracking, and query tuning with I/O and execution-plan explanations.
Part-time remote administration of AWS (EC2/RDS) SQL Server and MariaDB/MySQL databases — setup, monitoring, security, backups/DR, and query optimization.
Administered SQL Server 2019 Enterprise on AWS for an OCR signature-verification app — ETL from AWS EFS/S3, schema and table build-out, and automated operational reporting.
Planned, tested and executed a SQL Server TDE encryption migration between EKM providers (toward a certificate-based scheme), with key-rotation documentation.
Configured SQL encryption on a legacy SQL Server 2008 R2 / Windows 2008 R2 server running virtualized without a TPM.
Diagnosed transaction-log space issues on an AWS RDS SQL Server (~600 GB data / 500 GB log) and advised on backup strategy and reclaiming space.
Promoted relational setup data from staging to production SQL Server for a go-live, set up automated backup/recovery, reviewed indexes/fragmentation, and established data-promotion procedures.
Rebuilt backup-compression and maintenance plans for a SQL Server 2016 Web edition database during a move to Google Cloud Platform.