Chris Morris

Senior Database Design Engineer @Reward

I was initially hired as a contractor for development of complex stored procedures to support card-linked offers in the MyRewards scheme. With a strong background in query tuning and process efficiency I was called in to improve process durations on an increasingly frequent basis and after a few months Reward offered me a permanent position, in order to fill this skill gap in the company. Several major solo projects followed, including: • Tuning the morning batch load of data from the banks. Duration was reduced from about four hours to about 30 minutes.• Prototyping partition-switching for data loads to a ten billion row table, reducing the load time from 8 hours to about 10 minutes.• Prototyping a complex FIFO process. The old process takes over 30 hours to generate a billion row table and has a logic fault which had been accepted as inevitable. The new process runs in either 15 minutes or about 90 minutes, depending on how it\'s configured, and addresses the logic fault.In addition to performance tuning activities I had sole responsibility for some key projects including:• Setting up and maintaining Transactional Replication between the high-security MyRewards production server and a secondary used for marketing. This replaces a backup/shift/restore mechanism.• Configuring PRTG as a monitoring layer on the SQL servers. A major recent project was replacement of an obsolete business-critical server. This was a solo project right up to cutover day with two caveats: I had a brief daily meeting with the team destined to use the new server to discuss progress Two man-days of hands-on by the team, installing AWS connectivity and a forgotten data feedI\'ve given a few presentations covering the basics of query tuning and execution plan interpretation including how to diagnose and fix some common problems such as data type mismatches, UDFs causing serial plans, out of date stats etc. and followed these up with individual mentoring.