History of the dbSherpa

I maintained a website at dbartisans.com for almost 20 years, primarily as a place to ftp things and keep all my stuff. But as a website written from scratch in 2001 XHTML, it was not suitable as a blog.

So I migrated it all to a WordPress blog, and named it DB Sherpa, partially due to:

• a passion for mountains and the activities they afford
• an affinity for Mt Everest, Nepal, and a hobby collecting Nepali khukuri knives
• the rich metaphor of helping other database “climbers” successfully navigate the slopes of database design and development
• the domain was available 😉

I love sharing what I’ve learned in the course of designing and tuning Oracle for 23 years, and AWS/Azure/EDB PostreSQL for 7 years after that. I’ve been writing and speaking since 2001, trying to give back to the community that gave so much to me. These days I’m part of the executive board for the Utah Oracle User’s Group, and participate in Utah Data Engineering Meetup group, and the Salt Lake City PostgreSQL Meetup group.

I stand on the shoulders of giants. My learning adventure all started with Steven Feuerstein’s books. In the early days, I’d get my PL/SQL and Oracle fix by haunting the halls of RevealNet with Adrian Billington, William Robertson, and the “phantom nitpicker”. I often found the answers I needed on Tom Kyte’s and Tim Hall’s Usenet posts, books, and websites, which often had short, concise explanations, tests, and examples. Many other gurus filled my thirst for software engineering and database knowledge, like Connor McDonald, Michael McLaughlin, Alistair Cockburn, Hunt & Thomas, Steve McConnell, Guy Harrison, Martin Fowler, and many more.

Life then intervened: Ccnsulting with clients 60+ hours per week, six children, church service, and a steady string of hobbies. I dropped off the radar on the web around 2018 and only recently started to author articles again, on dataSherpa.blog, Substack, and Medium.

Over the years, I’ve found that “database people” love going it alone, starting from scratch, and reinventing the wheel. It’s my mission to put a stop to that.

This blog will focus on best practices, templates, tips, standards, and agile principles as applied to database design and development. These are subjects that normal frontend developers eat, sleep, and breathe. But for some strange reason, they are anathema to most database administrators and far too many database modelers and developers. It will be a notebook of sorts as well, documenting the problems I’ve encountered and (hopefully) their solutions.