SQLHA is happy to announce that Maxwell Myrick has joined as a Partner along with founders Ben DeBow and Allan Hirt. Maxwell comes to SQLHA as a 15-year veteran of Microsoft with experience on the SQL Server development team and Microsoft’s Mission Critical support team. He brings a deep technical knowledge of the Microsoft platform as well as a strong business sense as he has built million dollar businesses within Microsoft.

Prior to his Director of Incubation role, Maxwell held many diverse roles at Microsoft. His work has always been with a customer focus. He started in the field as a TAM supporting customers like Barnes & Noble when they rolled out their eCommerce solution and Harper Collins’ data warehouse effort, both on SQL Server 7.0 prior to its release. This work led to an offer to move to Redmond and join the SQL Server development team. There he designed and ran the Customer Lab for SQL Server which hosted 172 customers and their workloads from all around the world to ensure that they were successful on the platform. Over the next few years, he also had roles ranging including release manager, feature PM for upgrade, supporting Beta and TAP customers, as well as manager of sustained engineering.

After serving on the SQL Server development team for five years covering SQL Server 7.0, 2000, and 2005, Max moved to the newly created Mission Critical Program (MCP). He built and automated all aspects of that team’s lab, and created offerings including MCP Service Monitoring, Proactive Testing, and quarterly Upgrade Roadmaps. As Microsoft’s mission critical business grew, Maxwell chose to focus on developing an offering that ensured his customers achieved high levels of availability by providing customized recommendations which told them to apply only what updates they actually needed. To give them these recommendations, Maxwell reviewed all changes to the shipped products in the entire Microsoft stack each month and compared it against the code they actually used. His customers included banks, governments, tax authorities, stock exchanges, and transportation systems across the world. In addition, he moved onto Microsoft’s Premier Support headquarters as a Director of Incubation responsible for designing, implementing, and launching new support offerings.

“We feel that Max is a perfect fit for SQLHA,” says Allan Hirt. “With his business acumen and technical knowledge, along with a strong commitment to ensuring customers are always available, he will help SQLHA get to the next level. We’re excited to have him on board and between the three of us, we feel the sky is the limit.”

Ben DeBow concurs. “Max is a gem in the Microsoft rough and we could not pass up the opportunity to bring him onboard. Couple that with his knowledge and expertise in supporting the largest systems in the world and you have a great mix.”

“I’m excited to be joining the great team at SQLHA which shares a passion for customers and commitment to quality,” says Maxwell.

Maxwell Myrick’s first official duties with SQLHA will be in the Consultant’s Corner booth at PASS Summit from October 16 – 18, 2013.

Are you an author of a book (be it a chapter or looking to do the whole thing), whitepaper, or other type of publishable document? Are you writing a presentation and looking for a better way to put it together? Having trouble with writing session abstracts for possible speaking engagements – or ones you are being asked to do? Are you looking for an honest review and assessment to make whatever it is you are working on better? If so, SQLHA is announcing a new service for you whether you are a new writer just writing one chapter of a multi-author book or someone who has been around the block more than once.

Since the mid-90s, Allan has written countless numbers of documents from single page marketing slicks to near-1000 page books. He’s reviewed and tech edited most of those things, as well. While every publisher is slightly different in their formatting or templates, you still need to write compelling content for your readers. That is easier said than done. While your publisher (or maybe you are self-publishing) may have an official reviewer, you want someone to give you the straight scoop on your writing to make it sing rather than croak. This is where SQLHA’s new services for reviewing and editing come in.

Whether it’s your first draft no one else has seen and you want to whip it into shape before anyone else sees what it is you’re working on, or it’s later on in the process and you want a more formal review, we can help. Some of the things that we look at include:

• Content – Is the content itself complelling and worthy of publishing or do you need to still shape it and mold it into something with more focus?
• Phrasing – Whether you use one word too much or have odd phrasing, if your document is hard to read, no one will finish it.
• Translatability – Different cultures have different references, and sometimes analogies that work well in one place are not easily understandable elsewhere. You want your document – within reason of course – to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
• Grammar – While not looking to change your style, there are many basic mistakes (such as capitalization of the wrong thing, possessives, etc.) that many get wrong and go unchecked until a formal edit when these things become much more magnified. Go into your formal edits with things in much better shape.
• Flow – Are things logically laid out or is it a jumbled mess? If you confuse Allan, your readers will be as well.
• Goals – Are you delivering what you are intending or being asked to do? Does your document tell the whole story or did you leave out key plot holes?

The point here is to deal with problems earlier. When you’re writing a paper or chapter (or even a PPT for a presentation) that will be reviewed or seen by multiple people, much like doing sanity checks on your servers before you install SQL Server, you want to make sure things are correct and on the right path because having to do large scale revisions is much more costly as time goes on. You don’t want to have to fix flow and content issues when you’re already supposed to be published. The reviews can be simple or a more formal tech review. The document doesn’t even need to be about SQL Server, Windows, clustering, etc. – we can help you on any topic.

In addition to reviewing, SQLHA can provide editing services for your document to take it that extra step further. It allows us to be much more interactive and hands on with you to shape your end result into something everyone will like.

If you’re not an individual author but a corporation or publisher looking to have your document (of any kind) reviewed or edited, we can help you out as well.

Put Allan’s years of experience to work for you. Contact us for pricing and availability.

SQLHA is happy to announce our first service offerings – and they are all centered around failover clustering. We’ve got five different ones:

• Cluster Planning
• Cluster Deployment
• Cluster Verification
• The Works
• My First Cluster

For complete details on each offering, click here. We’re working on integrating this page with our existing menu structure, but the page will eventually be reachable under the “Our Services” menu above.

We look forward to working with you on your SQL Server cluster deployments.

We are very excited to announce that Allan will be delivering his newly revamped high availability course covering SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012  from March 19 – 21 in Woburn, MA. It is hopefully the first of quite a few deliveries in 2012. This course is being done in conjunction with Data Eduction. For full information, click here.

If you register before February 1, 2012, use the code EARLYBIRD and get a $200 discount.