Desmond Akaragwe

With 9+ years of experience in IT, as a Certified SQL Server Database Administrator, I have administered and provisioned SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2022 in Production, Test, Dev, QA and Clustered Environments. I am a Highly motivated self-starter with strong interpersonal and persuasive communication, outstanding problem solving and active listening skills. Having worked in several agile environments as the only DBA and with teams, my experience spans; Installation and Configuration of SQL Server, Upgrade and Patching, Performance Tuning, High Availability and Disaster Recovery/prevention, Upgrade and Database migration on prem and Azure cloud, deployment of SSIS and SSRS packages, and Active directory, and other Windows server features.

Sr. Database Administrator at Maryland Department Of Health (2021-08 – Present)

• Coordinated and Supervised Database Upgrade and Migration projects (Azure Cloud and Data Center migrations), implementation of security policies.
• Lead major project of upgrading and migrating all 2012 database and windows servers to SQL Server 2019, installing and configuring SQL Server 2022
• Lead major Migrations and automation from SQL Server on prem to Azure SQL, Azure VM, Manage Instance, AWS RDS and EC2, Salesforce and Snowflake.
• Analyze, solve and correct issues in real time and provide end-to-end problem resolution such as hardware and software purchases, server configuration changes and assisting business stakeholders’ developers with query/index tuning, Partitioning, compression and statistics to enhance speed and maximize system performance.
• Creating and managing maintenance plans and agent jobs that take backups and defragment indexes for query performance.
• Using Dynatrace for network security to monitor of entire infrastructure including database hosts servers, processes, and network. Also to perform log monitoring and view information such as the total traffic of network, the CPU usage of hosts, the response time degradation and failure rate of processes.
• Daily Performance tuning, index tuning of VLDBs to improve query performance and troubleshooting of SQL Server services outages as they occur, including providing 24 x 7 On-call support during after-hours and weekends. Providing scheduled maintenance, supporting application deployment, and hardware/software upgrades after hours.
• Planning the Installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2014, 2016, 2019, building, designing, Configuration, Upgrade, Migration and application of Windows and SQL Patching during scheduled database downtimes after hours in compliance with best practices, to ensure databases are up to date in production environments.
• Managing database users following principles of least privilege, performing auditing to meet compliance like SOX and HIPPA regulations
• Implementation and define a vigorous Backup and Recovery strategies and Capacity planning following the company's Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time objective (RTO) and the Retention policy.
• Managing users access and performance on several MYSQL instances.
• Managing Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Databases, Azure manage instance, migrating databases on-prem to azure and ensuring HADR and Security in Azure.
• Lead major migration and replication project from SQL server on prem to AWS RDBMS technologies like Oracle RDS and SQL Server RDS
• Develops documentation for the assessment and automation of repeatable processes.

SQL Server Database Administrator at UPS (2020-02 – 2021-07)

Contract

• Recommending and implementing data security by creating users and assigning permissions based on principles of least privileged and configuring Always Encrypted, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) to sensitive data.
• Leveraging the uses of in-built software in SSMS such as SQL Server profiler, Performance monitor, Extended Events, DMVs, Database Integrity checks to ensure database integrity, stability, and system availability and other Third-party software like IDERA and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to monitor system health and security.
• Building New virtual machines, configuring failover cluster, Configured High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Solutions on productions systems using Clustering - Always On, Traditional Failover Clustering (Windows Server Failover Cluster - WSFC), Database Mirroring, Replication such as peer-to-peer replication, merger replication and transactional replication and Log Shipping to make sure the databases are always available and participating in disaster recovery testing.
• Migrating Database from one server to another and to cloud (Azure).
• Managing and providing end to end support and problem resolution for Sql databases through multiple product lifecycle environments, such as development and testing to mission-critical production systems.
• Analyze, solve and correct issues in real time and provide end-to-end problem resolution such as hardware and software purchases, server configuration changes and assisting business stakeholders’ developers with query/index tuning, Partitioning, compression and statistics to enhance speed and maximize system performance.
• Creating and monitoring maintenance plans and agent jobs that take backups and defragment indexes for query performance.
• Responsible for applying patches to DBMS and supporting applications.
• Review T-sql scripts and providing recommendations to improve overall performance.

MS SQL Database Administrator at AL FUTTAIM GROUP (2017-09 – 2019-11)

• Design, develop, test, deploy and maintain databases, database objects, database security and database recovery solutions.
• Upgraded SQL Server 2005 servers to SQL Server 2016 with both In-place and Side By Side Upgrade for new client applications
• Configure and setup Always On availability groups in a 3-node cluster.
• Instituted the maintenance and support of Replication and Log Shipping
• Created various maintenance plans for index fragmentation and backups to automate the team’s tasks and ensure better system health and performance
• Identify existing systems that are candidates to be enhanced or modernized though detailed analysis of the use and design of current databases.
• Developing of SQL objects. Optimizes indexes and tables. Creates and maintains database dictionaries and schema documentation. Designs and deploys data table structures, triggers, functions, stored procedures, and views. Creates queries and reports. Fulfills data requests. Resolves database access and performance issues.

SQL Server Database Administrator at Ntarinkon Cooperative Credit Union (2015-08 – 2017-07)

• Designed and Administer SQL Server Databases
• Create, test, and implement TSQL scripting for Windows OS Batch and PowerShell
• Troubleshoot and resolving database integrity issues, performance issues, blocking and deadlocking issues, indexing issues, replication issues, log shipping issues, connectivity issues, security issues etc.
• Participate in meetings, report performance metrics, and support project management activities, including but not limited to timekeeping, status reporting, and presentations.
• Create and maintain documentation on client/server infrastructure systems, internal process, standard operating procedures.
• Provide SQL Database Operational Support to technical users.
• Create, document, and test backup and recovery procedures, logging and auditing to ensure compliance with organizational policies and standards.
• Provide resolution of database performance problems
• Analyze the data to determine the core problems, support integration with other ETL/Analytics tools.
• Configure and maintain database and related servers and systems.

Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management – University of Bamenda, Cameroon