Brian Allen

Experience

• 

  SurveyMonkey

  Staff Database Engineer

  Feb 2022 - Present

  SurveyMonkey is a global leader in online surveys and forms that empowers people with the insights they need to make decisions with speed and confidence. Our fast, intuitive feedback management platform connects millions of users worldwide with real-time AI-powered insights that drive meaningful decisions. We provide answers to more than 20 million questions every day so that people and organizations can attract new audiences, delight customers, create advocates, and extend their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Our vision is to raise the bar for human experiences by amplifying individual voices. Learn more at surveymonkey.com. Learn more at surveymonkey.com.

  • In this role, I am part of a team with 3 other Senior Database Engineers that maintain multiple multi-Terabyte databases that exist within Aurora MySQL and SQL Server. They are setup respectively as a cluster and within availability groups. We maintain our database systems with zdt and ensure the scalability of our databases. We do all our maintenance online, only allowing only minutes of downtime once per quarter. We utilize Terraform, Powershell, Python, and Lambda functions to automate as much as possible. We also use SQL Sentry and Cloudwatch for monitoring and alerting to keep us in touch with the health of our databases.
  • I set the direction for best practices and have led multiple cross-functional projects including our migration from PYMSSQL to PYODBC. I am also responsible for capacity planning and performance management. Since I have been here, we increased the durability of our data files from 96.6% durability to 99% durability at minimal cost as well as increased our durability of our T-Log files to 99.999% durability, resulting a much-needed stability of our database systems.
  • I have done significant analysis of our systems to "Rightsize" EC2 and EBS volumes. We were able to get significant savings by making adjustments. We also completed a plan in 2023 that resulted in halving the number of vCPUs and at the same time doubling the amount RAM at no added cost. This also resulted in significant license savings.
  • I have also tuned dozens of high resource consumption queries. The most prominent was called over 200 times a minute and was able to decrease the CPU Time on that sproc by 99%, the average reads by 99% and the average runtime by 40%. The next was a sproc that is called over 1200 times a minute. It’s runtime was reduced by over 50% and we saw a 60% reduction in CPU usage per execution, which equated to a 2% drop of the total server's CPU usage.
  • We have also migrated multiple MySQL Clusters into Aurora and have a few more to go.
• 

  Naxos of America

  Senior Database Developer

  Sep 2012 - Dec 2014

  Headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville, Naxos of America is the world's leading independent classical music company; distributing, marketing and promoting nearly 115,000 SKUs to traditional brick and mortar and online retail, as well as offering a comprehensive suite of services tailored to consumer direct fulfillment. Naxos of America is also the largest digital distributor of independent classical music, supplying a catalog of over 2,500,000 tracks to hundreds of digital download and mobile outlets worldwide. Celebrating 30 years in 2017, Naxos has evolved from its beginnings as a budget label to a leading classical music force.

  • Did SQL Server database and performance tuning as well as setup maintenance jobs and monitored their instances. I reduced their RPO down from 4hrs down to 15mins as well as reduced their RTO from 4 hours down to 30mins. I also decreased the runtime of over 20 queries from 30+ seconds down to < 100ms, with an average of 30ms. I assisted the data engineering group in performance tuning their ETL process.
• 

  HealthStream

  Senior Database Administrator

  Aug 2009 - Feb 2022

  HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations' greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by, collectively, approximately 4.8 million healthcare employees in the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, privileging, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has additional offices in Boulder, Colorado and San Diego, California.

  • I was a part of the Site Reliability Engineer Team. My focus was on finding ways to solve problems and make our high-volume, multi-terabyte databases and processes more streamlined and reliable.
  • I worked closely with development and QA teams in an agile, fast-paced environment to make sure they are producing the best T-SQL possible before it is released. I am also involved throughout the SDLC from analysis and design, through code review, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
  • I worked with the development teams to design the databases correctly as well as fix issues in the pre-existing databases design across whether it's in tables, views, stored procedures, indexes, functions, or constraints. In most cases by reviewing their T-SQL, index, and table design I can reduce the number of reads and writes by 50-90%.
  • I keep a close eye on our production databases to identify areas of improvement. I've identified places and processes for us to archive data. I've found and implemented solutions to our TempDB contention issues. I've made changes to the scheduling of various jobs and processes to decrease contention.
  • I've identified configuration changes to boost the performance of our production OLTP databases as well as our Data Warehouse databases through extended events, DMVs, Profiler, Query Store, and our database monitoring tool SQLDM.
  • I enjoyed building automation into the downtime processes with the help of Python and PowerShell scripts, which reduced the time spent on a downtime from 8hours down to 6hours. I have also automated azure devops pipelines to db builds and deployments.
  • I've designed system specifications and migrated databases between various versions of SQL Server Enterprise from 2000 through 2019, including migrating SSIS packages. I was able to migrate our Data Warehouse databases and servers with zero downtime.
  • I was also involved in our databases that exist on AWS, which include DynamoDB, Aurora, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
• 

  Hometown Quotes

  Senior Database Developer

  Sep 2008 - Feb 2013

  Hometown Quotes is built and run by insurance industry experts. Founded in 2003 on the keystone of Honest, Trusted Quality.Hometown Quotes’ industry expertise means our leads are not aged, recycled, or incentivized. Our commitment to agents means that we only sell leads we can stand behind. We’re able to do this because we generate and deliver the leads ourselves. When a customer searches for insurance online, we immediately match their information to our agents in real-time.But more than that, at Hometown Quotes, our agent services understand the value of your time and resources, because they have worked as agents themselves. We maintain our founding standards as we continue to service the industry’s top insurance agents nationwide. Hometown Quotes’ mission remains; to provide our agents with the best experience in the industry. We’re not a volume-discount store, we’re Hometown Quotes, and we’re obsessedwith helping agents grow. To learn how we can help your business grow visit here: https://tinyurl.com/3m4kkh32

  • Did SQL Server database and performance tuning as well as setup maintenance jobs and monitored their instances. I reduced their RPO down from 24hrs to 15mins as well as reduced their RTO from 2 days down to 1hr. I also decreased the runtime of over 50 queries from 30+ seconds down to < 500ms, with an average of 50ms. I also setup Redgate's SQL Monitor as the company's database monitoring tool.
• 

  HealthStream

  Sql Server Database Administrator

  Oct 2006 - Aug 2009

  HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations' greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by, collectively, approximately 4.8 million healthcare employees in the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, privileging, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has additional offices in Boulder, Colorado and San Diego, California.

  • I lead the database migration from our old data model to a new data model utilizing a Transact-SQL (T-SQL) ETL process for 9 databases and over 500Gb of data at the time. I kept consistent communication between the business owners, technical leaders, and quality assurance at all times, so we could achieve our goal.
  • I was part of the on-call rotation and also participated in production database monitoring and tuning. I worked closely with development daily using agile methodologies to deliver new features to customers. I designed and developed ETL processes using SSIS to populate fact and dimension tables in our data warehouse.
  • At one point it was down to me and 1 other database admin to maintain our production environment. We implemented a backup model that allowed us to take weekly full backups, daily differential backups, and every 15min transaction log backups. This allowed us to achieve an RPO of 15 minutes. We also set up log shipping to allow us to have a secondary which we could failover to. This allowed us to achieve an RTO of less than an hour.
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  HealthStream

  Systems Developer

  May 2002 - Oct 2006

  HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations' greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by, collectively, approximately 4.8 million healthcare employees in the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, privileging, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has additional offices in Boulder, Colorado and San Diego, California.

  • I developed multiple applications in C# and database designs in Microsoft SQL Server. I worked with version control to make sure every change I made found it ways back. I took part in our agile process and attended regular SCRUM meetings. I worked closely with QA to understand a fix bugs. I also got my first experience in Database Administration.

• Weberize Inc.

  Web Developer

  Jun 2000 - May 2002

  • Developed custom web applications with ColdFusion, ASP.NET, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, Javascript, HTML, and Flash.