Michael D'Spain

A little about me:

I don't have a computer science or IS degree and I am not fresh out of college. Working in data is a second career for me. I was a musician and music teacher for 12 years, 4 of those in southern California where I fell in love with Longboarding, prior to getting into working with SQL Server. In 2010, I was telling a friend of mine, who is a MicroStrategy developer, how I was burned out and wanted to change careers. He told me, "learn SQL and you will always have a job." I had no idea what SQL was. I bought some books and studied for about 9 months and took the SQL Server 2008 Development test. I passed and that helped propel me into a job as a SQL Server DBA in Dallas, TX. I never in a million years thought I would be doing this. It is actually quite rewarding. I love the process of trying to solve a problem.


So why the Surfing DBA when I live in land locked Dallas, TX. I have my Harbour 10.0 Banana hanging up in my garage. When living in SoCal, just about every weekend I was either surfing at Bolsa Chica Tower 22 or San O' or was snowboarding at Snow Summit. When my wife and I had kids, we moved to Dallas to be closer to family. I have never lost my love for the water and miss the ocean terribly. I have recently found DFW Surf Club and will dusting off the old board soon to try some wake surfing and a stand up paddleboard.

Hang Ten my fellow DBAs!!
Michael D'Spain

All authors

All authors

Blogs

Claude Code Helps Analyze Test Data Manager Log Files

By

I had a customer ask about analyzing their Test Data Manager (TDM) usage to...

PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI

By

I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...

Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server Query Tuning Fundamentals Starts Next Monday!

By

Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Is it uncommon for Dev's to have a data model of the source data

By Coffee_&_SQL

This is a generic question. To the moderators, I wasn't sure where to place...

ROLLUP to calculate Month total for all Categories

By Reh23

Good Afternoon, I have built a table with four columns:  Period(Month), Category, Numerator, Denominator....

Level 28: DAX Text Functions: The DAX Extract & Modify Functions: LEFT(), RIGHT(), MID(), REPLACE(), SUBSTITUTE()

By Bill Pearson

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Level 28: DAX Text Functions:...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Creating JSON I

On SQL Server 2025, what happens when I run this code: 

SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG( 'City':'Denver')
GO

See possible answers