I generally shy away from writing personal blog posts about my life, but when it comes to major career changes it's kind of fun to share the news.
After almost three years as an independent consultant, I have stepped out of that business and into a full-time role with a company called The Pythian Group, a provider of remote DBA services. Never heard of The Pythian Group? That's because although the company is big in the Oracle and MySQL worlds, it has just begun to make its move into the SQL Server arena. My job title is Global Practice Lead for the SQL Server practice, and I am tasked with, among other things, increasing the company's presence and business on this side of the fence. Fun stuff!
The Pythian Group has a very interesting business model that is at once both similar to what I knew as a consultant and totally foreign to the way I'm used to doing things. For example, as a consultant I generally billed my time in 15-minute increments; at The Pythian Group, time is billed in 1-minute increments -- great for the customer, not so great for the DBA. Luckily, they've built some tools to help ease the pain and after a week of totally hating the system I'm already starting to get used to it. (Sort of).
The company is heavily focused on automated monitoring and 24x7 support delivered via a network of offices around the globe -- things that as an independent consultant I never would have been able to deliver. I'm really excited to watch things scale up from what is currently a relatively small SQL Server group to what I expect will eventually become a fairly large one. I'm especially interested in seeing how some of the SQL Server 2008 tools -- such as Policy-Based Management -- will affect the way we work at Pythian. As a consultant I was not especially enthusiastic about that feature. As a remote DBA, it suddenly makes perfect sense.
Anyway, thanks if you've read this far, and I'll end with a bit of a plug: if this stuff sounds at all interesting to you as a DBA, drop me a line. We're hiring. And don't let the 1-minute increment thing scare you (too much).