August 2015 Employee Spotlight

August 7th, 2015

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Ian Gull - DBA
We asked one of our excellent DBAs to talk about how his career led him to RDT, what his role here entails, and what makes him tick...

RJ45

"Hello, my name is Ian Gull and I am a database administrator (DBA) at RDT. I joined RDT in 2007 and have seen the company grow from 24 members of staff to about 100. I’ve also seen significant changes to the way the company is structured and managed, including a major office move. At the time I joined, the role of a dedicated DBA was new here. But by late 2012 RDT had two of us, and we’re now part of a broader platform engineering team.

"Prior to joining RDT the majority of my career was spent in the City of London, working for a variety of financial institutions including small stockbroking firms, large multi-national banks and the Lloyds underwriting market. Apart from a couple of years as a developer at the start of my career, I’ve always been a DBA, working on a variety of database platforms including Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and SQL Server. Probably not what you’d expect for somebody with a degree in physics and astrophysics…

"My role at RDT is varied, but focused on Microsoft’s SQL Server platform. The work changes considerably from day to day and can include providing support to RDT’s development and QA testing teams, giving technical support and advice to RDT’s customers, getting involved in development projects as required, running specific DBA-only projects, maintenance of RDT’s SQL Server environments, and providing the database input into the build and release processes. The variety means that the job is never dull – a definite bonus.

RJ45

"Some of the projects I have been involved with include a handful of data migration projects where new clients taking RDT’s Landscape product had a requirement to migrate data out of their legacy systems into the Landscape database, a significant reworking of RDT’s MI solution to improve its resilience, and performance and involvement in the upgrade of RDT’s hardware and SQL Server environments. Currently I’m involved in a significant project to implement continuous integration (CI) processes across both application and database development.

"Of all the things I do I find the project work the most fulfilling, especially data migration projects that involve significant contact with equivalent technical contacts at RDT’s customers."

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