Delta, British Columbia, Canada
The technical services team is the first point of contact for MongoDB customers who reach out to us through the support portal. We help them answer their questions and resolve technical issues with their deployment, including both on-prem or in the cloud. We also regularly share knowledge across the team in several ways - presentations, knowledge base articles, mentoring sessions, and more. My team focuses specifically on core issues with MongoDB, including replication, sharding, and performance. We strive to help our customers get through their most challenging issues while also educating them on best practices so they may avoid these issues in the future.
The senior DBA role had deeper responsibilities, in addition to those covered by my previous role as DBA: - Provide guidance and direction from a database perspective for several high visibility projects undertaken by the BCSC. - Research, recommend, and implement database platform changes and/or upgrades to accommodate new processes and technologies. - Develop innovative ways to digest both structured and unstructured data, educate the development team on how these processes work.
As part of the DBA team, we get to work closely with the software development and systems operations groups to complete many projects and improve the BCSC systems. Significant technologies we've leveraged to achieve success include Azure DevOps, SQL server 2016 (utilizing SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, Always on availability groups), and Git, as well as many others.
Design, develop, and maintain Houle's SQL Server database infrastructure to support the needs of the business. This includes developing objects to be used in SSRS reports, proactive database performance monitoring and tuning, designing and implementing processes for cross-system data integration (including Sharepoint and CRM), recommending and implementing security best practices, participating in system upgrades and migrations, applying SQL Server patches and installing new instances, while ensuring the database infrastructure is highly available. We maintain detailed documentation of the database environment and all the processes listed above.
Focusing primarily on Microsoft SQL Server, and sticking closely to the best practices, our responsibilities include maintaining disaster recovery instances, keeping all working instances up to date with the latest patches and service packs, assisting with deployments in all of our working environments, analyzing and optimizing performance where necessary, and collaborating with various teams throughout the business to both advise on and participate in any projects which may require database changes. Maintaining detailed documentation is also a requirement, and is kept up to date to reflect the latest processes and architecture of the database environment. A regular rotation of after-hours on call availability is a requirement in the case of incidents that require immediate attention.
The technical operations team provides 2nd line operational support to the business users of Phillips, Hager & North as well as RBC Global Asset Management. Responsibilities include support for in house and 3rd party investment management applications, workflow and issue investigation, break-fix type situations, and often working amongst several different teams within the technology group to address high priority requests and incidents within their established SLA. We regularly perform application/configuration data changes involving direct database updates while following a standardized process to ensure data integrity. Also required is consistent monitoring, proactive improvement and maintenance of ActiveBatch and MS SQL Server workflows/automated jobs, and a regular rotation of after-hours on call availability.
As part of the Phillips Hager & North desktop team, we are the front-facing first point of contact for our business users at the Vancouver location for any technical issues. We provide first-line support for desktop issues, telecom, BlackBerry, teleconferencing and video conferencing, workstation deployment, as well as incident ticket management. We handle most of the communication between other technology teams and our end users as a way of maintaining our position as the 'face' of the technology group for PH&N.