Community & Talks

Simon's SQL is back — now on Hugo

After a five-year pause the blog has moved from WordPress.com to Hugo, hosted on Cloudflare Pages with the source on GitHub. All 140 posts, URLs, images and comments came along. Here is what changed and what is coming.

The last post here was in November 2021, announcing a PASS Data Community Summit session on running SQL Server on Kubernetes. Almost five years later, this is the first post from the blog’s new home.

What changed

The platform. Simon’s SQL lived on WordPress.com since March 2011. It now runs on Hugo with the Stack theme. The posts are Markdown files in a Git repository, and every push builds and deploys the site — which, for a DevOps person, is how a blog should have worked all along: write, commit, push, done.

Nothing was lost. All 140 posts from 2011–2021 were imported through the WordPress.com REST API, including images, slide decks and the comments people left over the years (they’re at the bottom of each post, marked as archived). Post URLs kept the same /yyyy/mm/dd/slug/ shape, so old links and search results still land where they should.

Categories finally mean something. Every old post was filed under “Common”. They are now split into Performance & Tuning, High Availability, Backup & Recovery, Troubleshooting, T-SQL & Scripts, Administration & Tools, Containers & DevOps and Community & Talks. There is also a Talks page collecting every conference and user-group session in one place, and a proper search.

Me. When the blog went quiet I had just moved from being a DBA at Visa to leading DevOps at Nowcom. Today I’m AVP of DevOps & DBA there, responsible for both the DevOps and DBA teams. The SQL Server work never went away — it just sits inside Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines and on-call rotations now.

What’s coming

The old posts were mostly short troubleshooting notes I wanted to be able to find again. That format still works, and I’ll keep it, but the topics will follow what I actually do these days:

  • SQL Server on Kubernetes in production — what held up from the 2019–2021 talks, and what didn’t.
  • Database CI/CD — schema deployments, DACPAC vs. migration-based approaches, and rollout safety at scale.
  • Running a DevOps + DBA organization — on-call, reliability work, and where the two disciplines overlap.
  • AI-assisted operations — where coding agents and LLM tooling genuinely help a database/platform team and where they don’t.

If any of the old posts are broken after the move — a missing image, a mangled code block — please email me at simon@simonsql.com.

Thanks for reading. It’s good to be back.