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Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock is a Head Geek™ at SolarWinds and a Microsoft® Certified Master, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, VMware® vExpert, and former Microsoft Certified Trainer. He has over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry as a programmer, developer, analyst, and database administrator. LaRock has spent much of his career focused on data and database administration, which led to his being chosen as a Technical Evangelist for Confio Software in 2010, where his research and experience helped to create the initial versions of the software now known as SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer. LaRock has served on the board of directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server® (PASS), and is an avid blogger, author, and technical reviewer for numerous books about SQL Server management. He now focuses on working with customers to help resolve problems and answer questions regarding database performance tuning and virtualization for SQL Server, Oracle®, MySQL®, SAP®, and DB2®. He’s made it his mission to give IT and data professionals longer weekends.

Posts Featuring Thomas LaRock

Secure by Design | Securing the Software Development Build — SolarWinds TechPod 038

The recent SUNBURST cyberattack on the SolarWinds software build environment is a concerning new reality for the software industry, representing the increasingly sophisticated actions by outside nation-states on the supply…

5 Things to Know About the Orion Platform Database Today

1. It’s the Back End for 14 Products and Connectors The full list is published here. The key is, a lot of products all leverage this single database, though not…

Secure by Design | Helping Our Customers Get Back to Business — SolarWinds TechPod 037

Organizations were stopped in their tracks when the cyberattack occurred. When you’re focused on taking the right actions to protect your environment, your users, and your entire enterprise, solid counsel…

Secure by Design | Our Plan for a Safer SolarWinds and Customer Community — SolarWinds TechPod 036

Companies must change the way they operate to combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks across ever-expanding attack surfaces. What we learn from one attack can help us protect against the next. Because…

Why Database Performance Is Key to Understanding Application Health

Traditional database and application monitoring used to mean talking about a single server, in a single data center, in a single location. Many monitoring tools were—and still are—built around this…

2021: The Year We May Be Able to Predict

Although our Head Geek Leon Adato may have attempted to predict 2020 last year, no one could’ve prepared us for what was to come. Today as we work from various…

Thoughts on the SentryOne Acquisition

I’m writing this as I fly to Charlotte. Yes, in the middle of a pandemic, I am on an airplane. My first flight since March and bringing back a flood…

You Were Built for This: Celebrating IT Pro Day 2020

The year 2020 has been a rollercoaster. With nearly every aspect of our daily lives flipped on its head, it’s hard to think of a single thing that went as…

No, You Still Don’t Need a Blockchain

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why you don’t need a blockchain. Blockchain is one long transaction log that always gets written to and is never backed up.…

Data Security and Privacy at Home

With one of the largest threats to a company’s security and privacy being its own employees, having employees work remotely only adds to the risk. While this year’s Verizon Data…