I love my new job!

I just have to chime in about how happy I am with my new job. I now work for Blue Gecko, as of August 30th. My role is a Senior Database and Systems Administrator. Blue Gecko is based out of Seattle though I'll be working out of my home in New Hampshire, albeit with my frequent travels to Seattle for family reasons, this will work out quite well.

Already in the last week, I've engaged in several tasks, all of which have been very interesting problems to solve. Not only that, but I've spoken with several existing and potential customers and never realized I really enjoy consulting with and acquiring customers-- hearing what problems they need to solve and being able to ascertain quickly how to solve those problems, making the customer look forward to engaging with us.

Who is Blue Gecko?

Based out of Seattle, their website states (http://www.bluegecko.net/)

"We don't eat, sleep, or go on vacation. We live for three things:

* Smooth, uninterrupted database operation for your company
* Proactive monitoring for potential problems
* Rapid, expert response with no restrictions or delays

"

We are a remote DBA (Database Administrative) service. We provide a service that would require an organization to have to hire a bunch of DBAs and even sysadmins. We provide this for Oracle, MySQL, and recently PostgreSQL and SQL Server.

Just from my first week here, there are some top-notch people that I'm already enjoying working with.

Some of the tasks I've worked on:

* Restoring data that a developer accidentally truncated from tables using InnoDB Tools (http://code.google.com/p/innodb-tools/). I hadn't done this before, and it was fantastic to be able to restore that data in such a dire situation

* Optimizing a query and ultimately how the data is stored in a table for a query that used a file sort that would be extremely slow unless you forced use of the index that the order by was using. The teaser was that EXPLAIN would show a full-table scan if the force index was used. This was a good exercise in understanding the buffer pool as well as how InnoDB works with indexes.

* Crawling through a schema with a bunch of tables and finding many optimizations

* Discussing deployment of The Sphinx Search Engine for a client who needs search functionality

* Various Perl questions from one of my Co-workers. I was able to send the code that I wrote for my book to help them solve a problem. I felt great being able to help someone so soon after starting a new job

The thing that has really dawned on me is that I prefer working on components within the LAMP stack, especially MySQL, with an eye on where NoSQL fits in as well.

I just wanted to write about my realization that I've had over the last several days!