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 in roles including 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. While at Confio, his research and experience helped to create the initial versions of the software now known as SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer. LaRock joined the SolarWinds family through the acquisition of Confio in 2013.
LaRock is also the Immediate Past President of 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 his time working with customers to help resolve problems and answer questions regarding database performance tuning and virtualization for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SAP, and DB2, making it his mission to give IT and data professionals longer weekends.
2017 Awards
- SQL Server 2008 Audit Change Group (last update: 3/10/2010)
- SQL Server 2008 Auditing Feature (last update: 3/3/2010)
- How to find out how long a SQL Server backup took (last update: 5/8/2009)
- Striping SQL Server Database Backups (last update: 2/12/2010)
- SQL Server 2008 Backup Compression (last update: 3/15/2010)
- Decimal Conversions in SQL Server Change Datatype Format (last update: 9/10/2010)
- SQL Server Database Mirroring Performance Monitoring (last update: 1/21/2011)
- Script to check all your linked server connections for SQL Server (last update: 5/27/2010)
- Import SQL Server 2008 Database Engine Policies with Policy Based Management (last update: 1/26/2010)
- Monitor Your SQL Server Linked Server Configurations with Policy Based Management (last update: 1/20/2010)
- Monitor Your SQL Server Virtual Log Files with Policy Based Management (last update: 2/9/2010)
- New Facets and Properties in SQL Server 2012 (last update: 2/17/2011)
- SQL Server Policy Base Management Has Clustered Index Condition (last update: 11/5/2010)
- Validate SQL Server Backups Exist with Policy Based Management (last update: 8/13/2009)
- DBA Survivor (last update: 7/1/2010)
- Identify when a SQL Server database was restored, the source and backup date (last update: 10/16/2009)
- Restore Individual Tables Using SQL Server BACPAC (last update: 8/28/2017)
- When was the last time your SQL Server database was restored (last update: 4/7/2009)
- Script to check that backup files still exist for SQL Server (last update: 7/23/2009)
- Exporting and Importing SQL Server Always Encrypted Certificates for Client Access (last update: 4/19/2017)
- Secure and disable the SQL Server SA Account (last update: 5/14/2010)
- SQL Server Dynamic Data Masking Discovery and Implementation (last update: 10/25/2017)
- Configuring SQL Agent Jobs to Write to Windows Event Log (last update: 10/23/2009)
- How to Find Long Running Job Steps in Microsoft SQL Server (last update: 7/13/2017)
- How to Find Long Running Jobs in Microsoft SQL Server (last update: 6/1/2017)
