It’s been a crazy 2025 where I focused on depth over noise, sharing insights on long-term experience and real-world problems. After digging into the post, I ended up breaking this up into two posts to give proper credit to all that happened in 2025. You’re also going to find that rather than chasing shiny AI trends, my work this year centered on helping technologists navigate AI complexity with clarity, especially when data protection was concerned.
I did keynotes, technical conferences, published writing, and performed community engagement and all the while the central thread was focused on practical impact: work that engineers can use, teams can adopt, and leaders can trust.
Setting a Direction
This year I delivered 11 keynote-level talks, both at technical conferences and universities. I didn’t just do thought leadership, but explorations of why choices matter and how technical professionals can succeed in uncertainty.
My favorite keynotes this year:
- The Oracle Analytics and Data Summit at Redwood Shores, CA at the Oracle HQ Campus in April
- SQLBits Redgate Keynote with Grant Fritchey for the Microsoft Data Community in June
- The PASS Data Community Summit with Steve Jones and Laura Copeland, (guest sign-boy, Grant Fritchey) in Seattle, WA in November
The themes that carried out through these presentations included:
- The evolving role of database professionals in hybrid and cloud environments
- How organizations can integrate AI responsibly and strategically
- The cultural and governance implications of data democratization
- Practical leadership in technology transformation
Rather than simply reporting on trends, these talks emphasized decision-making frameworks, helping audiences understand the deeper forces shaping our industry and how to act on them.
Deep Practical Engagement at Technical Conferences
In 2025, I was honored to speak at numerous technical conferences, sharing hands-on guidance and actionable takeaways. These presentations did cover some introductory material, but more often went in deep to help professionals solve real challenges in databases, DevOps, AI, and cloud infrastructure.
One highlight which may surprise folks that stood out for me was “PostgreSQL’s Rise to Power: Why the Open-Source Giant is Dominating the Database Landscape” at FOSSY 2025 in Portland, Oregon. This open-source event session examined the practical trends and architectural underpinnings that are driving PostgreSQL’s adoption across organizations of all sizes. There was a high number of younger attendees and when a 25-year old came up to excitedly speak to me about VIM, I was over the MOON!
I spoke at numerous events in Microsoft, Oracle, DevOps, Open-Source and AI Communities this last year:
- Zero to Understanding: Oracle for the SQL Server Expert
- Why the Command Line is Still King in the DevOps World
- Leading Through Transformation and the Impact of AI to Organizations
- Guard Rails of Data Democratization with AI in Today’s World
- DevOps in the Age of AI: Human Powered Evolution
…and more- 14 new technical sessions for 2025, not counting keynote content. Each of my technical sessions focused on practical lessons from the trenches of modern data engineering.
These demos and talks reflected my goal of tackling real issues that everyone is facing in tech today, not just the latest buzzwords.
Technical Writing with Staying Power
I ended up on the cover of the Financial IT magazine, which surprised me as much as anyone else, as no one had let me know beforehand that I was going to be headlined!
Writing remained a core part of my work at Redgate in 2025. Instead of short takes or trend pieces, I prioritized long-form, reference-quality content that database professionals, no matter if new or experienced, could reference.
Several Redgate/Simple Talk articles published this year included:
- Oracle ASM: A Simple Solution or Another Complexity? (Part 1) — a practical look at Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management and whether it simplifies or complicates real workloads.
- Oracle ASM: Monitoring and Managing (Part 2) — continuation of the deep dive into performance, resilience, and management strategies for ASM.
- Oracle’s Limited Cloud Vendor Licensing — a candid exploration of licensing complexity as enterprise databases move to cloud platforms.
- What is Oracle RAC and Why Use it for Scaling Workloads? — accessible guidance on when and why Real Application Clusters matter.
- Oracle Architecture Overview — a foundational piece designed to give engineers clarity on how core Oracle components work in practice.
I also wrote a total of 35 posts this year on DBAKevlar. I was really thrilled that I was able to contribute to my own blog again, as I started it back in 2008, which means there’s 18 years of investment demonstrating my own technical journey.
Community Through Podcasts
In addition to writing, I continued my involvement with the Simple Talks podcast, where we unpack technology adoption, career experiences, industry challenges, and emerging topics like AI governance and data security.
I also participated in Simple Talk’s “State of the Database Landscape 2025” podcast alongside Louis, Steve, and Grant, discussing trends in security, AI adoption, and database professional development. In the first half of 2025, there were so many, I wondered if all I was going to do was podcasts and keynotes for the year.
But…there’s more
As I’m breaking this up into two parts, the next post I’ll get into community, mentoring and advisory work that was part of my 2025, so stay tuned!
