About Me

I used to be a SQL Server DBA…

…but now I’m trying to be a BI Developer. One thing that’s the same is I try every day to suck less.

My real name is Kerry L. Tyler, and I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area. I am currently a Business Intelligence Dev in a small corner of a global security company, helping to make large piles of data into useful pieces of information for anyone who would find such things useful. By that, of course, I mean, “everyone.”

I’ve been in the IT industry full-time since 2003, was a full-time DBA between 2008 and 2011, and am now doing the BI thing. I went to school for and got a degree in Telecom/Networking, but somewhere along the line I realized that I wanted to play with servers more than I wanted to play with huge pieces of Cisco gear (although, between you and me, sometimes I wish I had big green pieces of network equipment to play with). While managing lots of Windows Servers in about 2005, I wound up with a cranky SQL 2000 instance on my lap, and the rest is history. (I believe that server is still running today, but I don’t really want to talk about it.)

One of the incidents I can point to that got me to where I am now was the first time I saw Reporting Services demo’d at DevConnections in Fall 2005, during release week of Yukon SQL Server 2005. I saw things that I could use in the office /tomorrow/, and that’s the moment I learned what “BI” really was. Ever since, BI was what I wanted to really do; I knew that going through some straight-up DBA work would help with that in the long-term.

I’ve done a lot of SQL 2000 administration, built a SQL 2005 cluster from scratch when I still really had no idea what I was doing, and have done a little bit of 2008 stuff. These days, I’m doing ETL work in Data Integrator with data going to/from SQL Server and Oracle. I’m trying to learn Analysis Services with the curveball of the star schema living on Oracle. It may not be my favorite technologies everywhere, but I’m learning stuff every day, which is all I can ask for.

On the weekends, I mow the lawn, think about how I used to mountain bike regularly, and try to keep the basset hounds out of trouble. I used to fly little airplanes a fair amount, so I think a lot about how I used to do that, too. We travel when we can, and have had some killer trips in the western US, but are currently having withdrawal symptoms because of how long it’s been since we’ve been to LAS.

What’s with the “Airborne Geek” thing?

This goes back to AOL Instant Messenger. Group leader in school wanted to use it as main means for comm, but I didn’t have an account at the time, so needed to come up with something. Took my flying hobby and the computer thing and wound up with Airborne Geek. It’s been the only name I use for online things for a long time.

For almost as long, I tried very hard to keep my online presence separate from my real life one, but recently I decided that since I didn’t want to start using my real name as a separate online brand, if you will, I needed to get over that. This blog is basically my first, very large, step in making that transition. In the time since I launched this blog, I’ve pretty much gotten all over that, so both names show up side by side lots more often.