Hi, I’m Valerie Parham-Thompson. I’m an open-source database engineer, with deep experience scaling databases in production — critical databases behind a lot of the products and services your company uses every day.

I’m most interested in hearing about your challenges, and how I can help you prepare your team to run databases in production. Hopefully, we will get a chance to talk. If you’d like to know a little bit more about me, read on.

I have over 20 years of experience helping companies improve database performance, scalability, and resilience to support their core functions.

Select projects include:

• Improving performance of opens and clicks analytics – email marketing
• Automating upgrades and other maintenance of 100s of database servers – media streaming
• Scaling databases to meet holiday traffic – wearable fitness tech
• Designing high availability to avoid outages – telecommunications
• Automating health checks across a cluster to give insight into performance – meeting and collaboration software
• Accelerating data ingest from IOT devices – electric cars
• Architecting database modernization and high availability – international restaurant chain
• Tuning database replication and reads to reduce failures – social media
• Crafting a low-latency cross-regional data layer – grocery chain inventory system
• Planning for consistent writes across data centers - financial services

Throughout years of working with high-traffic, critical databases, I’ve developed the wisdom and intuition that comes from spending nights in war rooms and late-night release parties, and waking up to a screeching pager.

These experiences leave me with an incredible amount of empathy for the time and effort required to rescue a database that wasn’t well-planned, and a desire to help production teams develop the confidence that the data layer is on solid ground.