About
I'm Ward Minson. I've been a SQL Server database administrator since January 2007, a U.S. Navy veteran before that, & the person Bob reports to now.
Nineteen years of production SQL Server
I started at the Chickasaw Nation Division of Commerce in 2007 & spent six years there running Microsoft SQL Server. After that: Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, Emerging Minds, Acro Service Corp, & a documentation-heavy contract at Presidio.
At Lumeris I was Principal DBA on databases holding Protected Health Information, with the access controls & encryption that HIPAA demands. At ComTec Consultants I supported Entergy for four years; my SSRS security reporting carried the client through NERC CIP auditing at 100% compliance, & my Always On availability group recovery work produced a 95% improvement in uptime satisfaction. Most recently, at Cloudingo, I engineered de-duplication & data-integration pipelines for enterprise Salesforce clients under GDPR, PCI DSS, & SOC 2. The availability groups I managed there held 99.9% uptime, & moving routine maintenance to PowerShell cut administrative overhead by 70%.
Where the AI part came from
Over the last several years I put GitHub Copilot, GPT-4, Claude, & Gemini to work on real database problems: semantic mapping, entity resolution, data cleansing for large-scale migrations. That convinced me the tooling was ready for the unglamorous middle of database work, not just the demos.
Bob is a 2026 project of my own lab, independent of any employer, past or present. Nineteen years of on-call had left me a specific list of frustrations: the 2 AM pages for restarts a script could have done, stuck Agent jobs waiting on a human to click retry, alerts nobody reads until the third one fires. With that list in hand I conceptualized, designed, & built Bob: an autonomous agent that monitors SQL Server & the network it lives on, runs an 11-phase sweep every 5 minutes, & fixes what his authority matrix allows. The full rundown is in What Bob is & what he can actually do, his voice alerts play on Bob's Alerts, & the longer story is becoming a book, The Birth of Bob.
Compliance background
SOC 2, NERC CIP, HIPAA, PCI DSS, & GDPR, in production, under audit. The habits that follow from that work (least privilege, access audits, transparent data encryption, backups measured against RPO & RTO rather than hope) are the same ones Bob enforces on this site's own infrastructure. Our own data practices are documented on the Privacy & Compliance page.
AI for DBAs
This site, the LinkedIn newsletter, & the community around them exist for one audience: DBAs who want the repetitive end of on-call handled by software they can audit. Field notes land on the blog as I go. If you want to talk about your environment, the contact form reaches me directly.