From Developer, to SysAdmin, to DBA, to data Engineer
Welcome! I'm Justin Mullis, and I'm looking forward to sharing my journey in the world of tech! My experiences in my career are varied from time spent chasing semi-colon errors as a Software Developer, to wondering how the SQL AG was setup as a SysAdmin (I spent most of my time as a "Accidental DBA" as they call it) to wrangling data with SQL as a DBA and now as a Senior Database Operations Engineer (a very fancy title and way to say 70% Data Engineer, 30% DBA).
I’m excited to share my experiences, lessons learned, and opinions with all of you—whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro looking for new insights!
Starting off I went to college for software development but I never quite enjoyed it as much as the database focused classes - that was my first indicator that I might enjoy working with data more than coding. I worked with C#, and WPF Apps during my time as a software developer, querying SQL Server databases and an IBM iSeries DB2 database.
However during my time I did fall in love with the SQL server databases and with no dedicated DBA and just a handful of SysAdmins they were hurting a bit. So when the opportunity came for an open SysAdmin spot I applied and was accepted (I was told I would mainly be looking to improve the databases uptime and availability - and we will get into how that went!). Through my time there I worked on many types of printers (label, hip, normal) as well as a variety of PowerShell scripts and normal admin tasks inside AD/AAD. Can't forget the password resets too.
When it came to the databases - I got them up to speed best i could, the backups running faster and increasing their frequency as well as helping the analytics department increase the reliability of getting data from the IBM iSeries DB2 database to SQL Server (Doing this alone they would see a roughly 30% increase in the speed of their VBA queries in excel). The servers quickly started to fold under the increasing load however - and so we engaged a consultant with my recommendation that 2 new servers get purchased and ensure they had plenty of ram and SSD disks in proper raid format. The consultant agreed and a plan was placed and executed.
Now with some creation of non-clustered indexes the servers were happy and humming along without issue. The queries now if you migrated them over were seeing around 70% improvement in speeds overall after ensuring they had indexes. Overall these databases grew and grew with the DB2 source side having around 10TB and the SQL servers being at around 4TB but now the queries were 70% faster on average & I had managed to cut costs by 50%. I had gotten underway migrating some of the pipelines transferring data over to Azure Data Factory - which is what lead to me making the next career jump, and first ever change to a new employer.
Now here we are closing in on present day. I got hired on as a Database Operations Engineer and rapidly made the move all the way up to Senior, in under 2 years. I know, crazy, and looking back at it and I am extremely grateful for the mentorship and management who saw my potential and rolled the dice.
Maintaining and migrating 50+ SSIS packages to Azure Data Factory, making sure all imports from sources are on time, engaging with various teams and helping review pull requests as well as doing some work on DevOps pipelines and lets not forget an even larger data foot print to wrangle.
Well that is it! I hope you enjoyed reading a bit (honestly a lot wow did I type all that?!) about my past experiences in my career in IT. I hope you enjoyed it and make sure to click the subscribe in the bottom right for future content!
I'm looking forward to sharing mainly technical content around Azure ETL/ELT and SQL Server knowledge I have built up - but who knows I might just write a few more personal ones too!
Justin