A little about Erland Sommarskog
and my Consulting Services

This page gives some information about my consulting services, my résumé in summary and in detail. At the end there is some information about my life beyond SQL Server.

Erland Sommarskog SQL-Konsult AB

Erland Sommarskog SQL-Konsult AB has exactly one employed: me. And, no, there are no plans for expansion.

I started this company when I left my old job at the end of 2007. My idea is to provide expert consulting around SQL Server. As things I have turned out, I have had long gigs with two clients. Somehow they liked me and the work I did, so they wanted to keep me. :-) But beside these I have many smaller engagements where I do performance tuning/reviewing, or where I do mentoring or act as a discussion partner to help clients to find the best design for their solutions.

SQL Server is a very broad product, and I would commit a gross lie if I said that I knew it all. My expertise lies with the Database Engine and the tools and my focus is on systems development and design. Things that I feel very confident with are:

• Data modelling.
• T-SQL Programming.
• Best practices for SQL Server access from client level.
• Query tuning.
• Security.

As for pure DBA duties, I have never had such a position, but I've learnt a good deal in my work, as well as from my MVP colleagues, and I would definitely enjoy such a gig. I have no experience of the BI side of SQL Server.

Technical knowledge outside SQL Server: My best language outside SQL Server is Perl. Recently, I'm trying to pick up Powershell and Python, and I can write C# and C++ left-handedly. Since I have worked extensively with system development also without databases, I feel that I can contribute to discussions about system design in general, even if my knowledge of .NET in general is shallow.

Geography: As I live in Stockholm, this is where I expect to have most of my clients. But I like travelling, and I don't mind working with customers elsewhere.

Availability: The problem with being a one-man band, is that there is a short distance between having too much work and having too little. Currently I am engaged with one client for about 80 %. If you want to engage me for a shorter mentoring or performance-tuning job, I wil try to find the time. Please get in touch.

Short Résumé

• Graduated from Lund Institute of Technology 1985 with a masters degree in Electrical Engineering
• May 1985 - Dec 1995: Employed at ENEA Data AB as a consultant.
• Jan 1996 - Dec 2007: Employed at Abaris AB and Tieto as a database expert. (Tieto acquired Abaris in the beginning of 2007.)
• Since Jan 2008; Self-employed independent consultant.
• I was awarded SQL Server MVP in April 2001.
• I'm a speaker at several SQL Server conferences, in-person and virtual. I give 10-15 talks per year, see my presentation page for a list.

Long Résumé

Erland Sommarskog SQL Konsult AB 2008-

Up to 2017, I mainly worked for Tieto, who had acquired the company I worked with before that. In 2018, I split my time between Tieto and Peab (a construction company), and since 2019 Peab is my main client. At Peab I work with development and maintaing a system which is a frontend to their ERP system for region manager, project managers etc. I write advanced stored procedure and talk with business users about the solutions. (Understanding the business has always been important to me. If I don't understand the business, I cannot bring value to the users.)

All through the years, I have a few short advisory and performance-tuning gigs with other customers, of which several have engaged me more than once.

Abaris AB/Tieto, 1996-2007

Tieto, a major Finnish-Swedish IT corporation acquired Abaris, the company where I had worked for in eleven years, in the beginning of 2007. Abaris itself was a small company. We were 25 when I joined in 1996 and we peaked at 120 in 2001. At the time Tieto acquired the company we were around 85 persons in Stockholm, Gävle, Helsinki and Oslo.

The main achievement of Abaris is AbaSec, a very broad system for securities trading: placing orders, gateways to external systems, back-office for settlement and custody, asset management, fund management, pension-savings and more. Today, AbaSec is a prominent part in Tieto's portfolio for capital-market solutions and it's the leading product of its kind on the Nordic market.

My main task at Abaris/Tieto was being responsible for the database for the back-office system, which is the core component of AbaSec. More in detail, this means:

• Database design and writing many of the complex stored procedures.
• Occasionally working with the client part of the application.
• Participating in the overall architecture on the functional level of our system.
• External support: logging into a customer's server to try to find out what our system did wrong. Or what they did wrong. Or simply trying to track down a performance bottleneck.
• Tool smith: I've built an extensive tool set for configuration management of our databases, so that we easily could deploy and upgrade databases at home and at customer sites.
• Assisting with the usual DBA tasks – backups, DBCC, restores and sometimes trying to recover a crashed customer database.

This may seem very broad to you, but this is the charm with working in a small company: you become a jack-of-all-trades almost by necessity.

ENEA Data AB, 1985-1995

ENEA is a consultant company, which in practice means that I changed jobs every once in while, without changing employers. Here is what I did during my ten years at ENEA:

Lund Institute of Technology 1982-1985

I worked extra as a student teacher in Programming and Mathematical Statistics. During this period I was exposed to Fortran, Pascal, assembler and Simula.

Beside my engineering classes, I also had one semester of practical philosophy.

Other merits

I was awarded SQL Server MVP in April 2001 and kept the award since.

I had two articles published in SQL Server Professional, the issues of January and August 2000. (And if you wonder why I have not published any articles since, the answer is simple: I prefer to write for my own website where I can update the article as new information comes in.)

Back to my home page.