John Q. Martin is the product manager at SentryOne , looking after SQL Sentry and the core monitoring suite. John is also a Microsoft Data Platform MVP with more than a decade of experience in SQL Server and the Microsoft Data Platform. John is an experienced DBA and developer, and a former Microsoft premier field engineer. Having worked with SQL Server for the last decade, he has gained a broad understanding of how to use, and misuse, SQL Server. John is also EMEA representative on the PASS board. John blogs at blogs.sentryone.com/author/johnmartin and can be found on twitter as @sqldiplomat.

Mala Mahadevan: How did you get to the data profession?

John Q. Martin: One part of my past that I think is important to call out is that I was not academic or great at school. Simply put, I failed my A-levels. In essence, I was a high school dropout. My route into a career in IT was an accident—a happy one as it transpires.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away…. Well, around 2003 and in the UK, I started what might be considered a career by working as a technical store man for an IT service provider. I cleaned and maintained hardware, and delivered it between sites around the UK. This was my introduction to IT. From there, I moved over to working as second-line tech support for the desktop team, supporting end users. It was here that I got my hands dirty by supporting a Windows migration from NT 4.0 to XP.

After a year or so on this, I moved to another desktop support role. This time working with a diverse array of end users. I was also on the periphery of the migration from NT to XP here too. Looking back, these interactions and the time spent working with and supporting our end users helped me develop empathy for those that I support and build systems for today. I want to understand what frustrates them.

My move from general IT to data was again an accident. The application support team needed a new member of staff to take over supporting an estate management application. I foolishly thought, why not? Here I was working with an application delivered via Citrix and hosted on SQL 2000, with SSRS 2000. Because of the limitations of the application, I needed to start getting writing reports and DTS packages to help improve data quality and automate large bulk actions.

At this time, I was blessed to work alongside a man called Martin Henwood. A man that I consider to be my primary mentor when it came to SQL Server and the business world. His technical guidance and sage advice on the intricacies of how businesses work and how I should learn have stuck with me and helped get me where I am today. I was very lucky to have such a generous person who would take the time to help a young oik new to data and IT get a foot on the career ladder. For this, I am indebted to Martin.

My next step was out into the big bad world and working as a business intelligence developer as part of a team implementing a new ERP platform at a manufacturing company. This was an interesting role where I worked again with some great people and I got my introduction to data warehousing on SQL Server thanks to a gentleman called Chris Todman.

Then it was time to go and experience life as a DBA, working as part of a small team of DBAs or as a lone DBA. I was the guy who did the builds and backups, and deployed to live when the development team needed. This was fun. I met some more great people who I still consider friends, and who like me, went on to start actively contributing to the data platform community.

This is where I discovered the importance of effective communication and how it could have a massive impact on the ability of teams to perform their jobs. I still firmly believe that the DevOps culture that we see today is just effective communication between multidiscipline teams who focus on delivering results.

A couple more hops and I found myself at Microsoft as a premier field engineer, working in the same company as Bob Ward, Mark Souza, and others that had helped shape my path and focus on SQL Server technologies. I spent my time as a transactional engineer, where the work would be different from week to week. Starting the week off with a health check for a customer and finishing it off by having to go on-site with a customer to help resolve a critical support ticket that they had opened with the CSS team.

I have to say that Microsoft was an incredible company to work for. I would recommend that everyone who works with the Microsoft Data Platform try to make this happen. From Microsoft, I joined SentryOne—all thanks to what I thought was a throwaway conversation with Nick Harshbarger in the lobby at SQLBits 2015. I joined as a solutions engineer and then made my way to working in product.

My path through my career has taken me to many roles, but it is important to think about what you do outside of work. My community activities have meant that I got the chance to speak at events all over the world, meeting great people and making lifelong friends. If it was not for being involved with my local data platform group all those years ago, I would have never met my amazing wife. I also studied alongside work, gaining a degree from the Open University in the UK via distance learning.

Where my path leads, I’m not sure. There will be twists and turns and opportunities as well as a few setbacks, no doubt. No matter what comes my way, I take the chances that I am given.

Mala: As a product manager, you work with a lot of cross-functional teams. That’s typically something a lot of techies are not totally comfortable with. How do you deal with it? What kind of strategy do you use for that?

John: The key thing in my experience is effective communication. So you can be a good communicator, but you can also at the same time be an ineffective communicator. It’s about understanding the types of people you need to deal with. So if you look at the likes of developers and things like that, a lot of them are typically given the facts, given the information. Be short, sharp. Give them that and then let them get on with it.

Then the technical product marketing, where they’re a little more verbose. They’re a little more about building dialog and relationships. It’s about understanding the types of personalities that you’re dealing with, because you need to be able to communicate technical information quite often in a non-technical way.

It’s all about effectively communicating the message to the appropriate people. It’s understanding who you’re talking to and what’s important to them. Do you need to build the dialog so that they trust you and the things you’re saying? Or are they quite simply someone who just wants the facts? It takes a little bit of time to understand those people and understand what you’re dealing with.

I’m a people watcher. I can sit quite happily in train stations, airports, things like that for hours and just watch the world around me and the interactions that you see. I take that skill into the office. It takes time. Don’t ever expect anything to be really quick. Always be prepared to just take a step back and have a look at something. That’s how I really understand who I need to speak to. How I need to speak with them to be able to convey that message across different variables.

Here, I deal with our engineering teams. I deal with product marketing. I deal with marketing itself. I deal with the solution engineering team. I deal with sales, as well as having some interaction with the business. So there’s a lot of technical and non-technical roles, and quite often they’ll be in the same meeting. It’s about finding that level, and it takes time. Don’t expect it to come quickly, but be prepared to open your mind.

DevOps are something we’ve been trying to do for a very long time. At its most fundamental level, it is effective communication. That’s what’s key to a DevOps culture. If your company’s moving toward that sort of thing where you’re doing DevOps, it will help you when it comes to cross-functional communication.

Mala: What are some significant things to ensure success and value of the product you manage?

John: One of the most important things that we do here at Sentry is something that I’ve throughout my career is taking on feedback. There are so many great, cool, wonderful, and shiny things that you can do with technology today, but in order for it to be successful, it has to solve problems for people. In order to have something that’s successful is to basically canvass opinion and gather as much feedback from either a diverse array of customers in the industry. Find out the pain points, the problems that exist, and then focus on an area. How does this problem affect this particular area? And then that is how we’ll decide to understand what you’re looking to build.

It’s almost like it’s released into the wild. It’s about establishing and maintaining that constant feedback loop—speaking with people at the technical conferences, and holding regular customer success meetings with key clients. Is the product that I put out something that the people are talking about? Is it making lives easier and better for people? That’s one of the things.

We use a framework called the pragmatic marketing framework , which is all about understanding the market problems to help build the right solutions that will help people.

Mala: How do you manage conflicts with stakeholders when you manage the product? Like one person wants this feature, the other person thinks it’s going to take too long. That kind of stuff.

John: Yeah, that’s a very common scenario. This is where—again, coming back to the pragmatic marketing framework—it’s all about understanding. If you’ve got two or three different people who want different things, it’s about saying, okay, for this feature, product, capability—is there a problem to solve in the first place that is impacting people? Have we got anyone that’s willing to buy it? Have we done any research to understand what we need to look at trying to deliver? And then that all comes back to building up what we refer to essentially as an opportunity assessment. So there’s an opportunity here to build some software, to solve a problem.

And then we’ll take that information and we’ve got a framework essentially for grading them.

It comes back to the point about effective communication. It is making people understand that you need to make decisions with facts, figures, and numbers. You have to be data-driven. Gone are the days of being able to do something on gut instinct. If you’re ultimately building something, and it doesn’t work, that’s a lot of expenditure, time, and effort.

The long and short of it is effective communication between all the key stakeholders. Don’t play email tennis. Make sure that everybody’s on the same page and that you’ve communicated effectively. It basically can eliminate conflict very, very quickly.

Mala: What’s the best feature you’ve been part of and why?

John: At SentryOne , working to deliver the new Top SQL tab. More recently, delivering the managed instance capability. We support managed instances. Whilst it’s now in public preview, We’ve delivered that very, very rapidly. But from an agility and responsiveness perspective, I’d have to say managing the SQL Server. I can’t pick one, unfortunately.

Mala: What are the differences you see in waterfall and agile methodologies, and why?

John: Waterfall has a place, and I view that as more of a strategic way of managing things. The SQL Sentry solution we have now is nearly fifteen years old. Managing something over that scale of time strategically in an agile methodology is very difficult to do, so having some form of strategic roadmap—you’ve got to review it. You don’t put it in a sentence, leave it for two years, and then go back and wish you’d done something differently six months ago. We review it on a regular basis.

Agile is the delivery and being responsive to small pieces of work that are easily definable and doable within the work timeframe. The difference between being agile and context switching is the difference between being productive and being unproductive. If you can’t do context switching, then the teams delivering the work don’t know what they’re doing when they’re doing it, and they start to lose that bigger picture. Whereas with agile—doing it right, they still have that view of the bigger picture, but they’re delivering small pieces of work very rapidly.

Mala: Describe your experience with cloud adoption .

John: Cloud adoption is gaining a lot of momentum. Five years ago, I have to admit, I was very skeptical about the way that it was positioned and marketed. The market was way ahead of the capabilities at the time. In that intervening time, I’m happy to say that I was proved wrong.

The rate of development that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and even Rackspace have put into engineering solutions are in demand…. Azure SQL Database has the ability to run virtual machines in the cloud, basically removing barriers to adoption, both within the enterprise and the start-up community. I’m seeing a lot of interest at SQL conferences.

You don’t define how many VMs behind the scenes. It’s pay for what you use on a transactional basis. There’s an opportunity to save money because that will fluctuate. You don’t need necessarily 150 web servers that only get full on Black Friday. You’ve got the ability to scale up and down as needed, as well as scale out and then scale back in again.

I think there’s going to be in the next decade an awful lot of hybrid environments are really going to come to the fore. A lot more utilization of service element platforms. It’s going to be building complementary solutions around, so you think about cosmos with Azure SQL database, managed instances, Spark, data bricks , all of those are platform technologies. You’re not going to use one for an entire solution, it’s about building and compartmentalizing everything in such a way that it’s modular and use the right technology for the right solution.

Mala: Right, totally, yeah.

John: That’s come a long way, even in the last five years. I think that’s going to continue as we go forward. Yeah, like I say, it’s something that I’ve gone from being skeptical about myself, even working for a cloud vendor to firmly believing that it’s got a very prominent place in our industry now.

Mala: What are some industry trends that you’re really excited about?

John: Containers are becoming very much mainstream. When you look at what containers and text to data platform, they’re not necessarily the right fit, because they’re typically immutable. You’re going after the desired state. I want five replicas, I want three replicas, I want 20 replicas, which doesn’t always gel with having a data persistence there that we would be familiar with regard to things like SQL server. I think there’s a lot of, as that technology rapidly matures, we can see more and more ways of implementing the data platform, that’s something that’s going to be a real game-changer, because if you look at the Azure service fabric, which Microsoft recently open sourced, that’s another orchestration mechanism, and having spoken to the couple of people, it’s really about the needs that you have - you can have some on premises, some on Azure, some in Amazon. You’ve got a common framework for managing all of it, but typically you want to have a look at something that’s stateless so that you can just spin things up and tear them out, whereas something like Azure is more for stateful scenarios at this point in time. Whether that will change, I don’t know. Probably.

I think that’s something that I do find exciting, as well as the spark or the non-relational data platform technologies, they’re coming up as well. Ultimately, there’s also going to be a big place for serverless, just because of the potential for things involved with that as well. Those are the three key things that I’m really interested. I can’t, like I said, they’re all very closely related and building on top of each other, but that’s the area that I’m very excited about in the next three to five years.

Mala: How do you measure the success of a product?

John: With regards to our product, there’s a couple of different ways that we look at it. Obviously, there are raw sales—the number of customers buying licenses, and the number of licenses those customers are buying. The other key thing that we do is something we refer to as customer success organization. Everyone’s familiar with sales. Everyone’s familiar with support and customer service. Customer success is all about actually communicating with your customers. For some of the large customers, we may do it every six months. For other customers, once a year.

If you’re the only product in the market space and people don’t like it, as soon as you get someone else coming into that market space, you end up with a disruption scenario, and they’ll jump ship, potentially, because it may be viewed as, it may not necessarily be better, but it may be an alternative they want to try. It’s all about obviously selling licenses and building up your customers, but also making sure that those customers you have are happy with the product.

Mala: So true.

John: If they’re happy with the product, you can be confident that yes, we will remain with that or continue to grow. Even if others come into the same market as us with disruptive and new offerings, we can be confident that our customers are happy with what we have, and they’re willing to communicate with us when we’ve got a problem, we may have released stuff that has a bug in it, so they’ll contact us, we’ll get it fixed, and then they could be confident that they could come to us from that perspective as well. We like to make sure that our customers have all this when it comes to the product. We’re not building something that we think they need, we’re building things that they’re actually saying they need, and that’s how we look to guarantee success, is because if you’ve got enough people that are asking for something, they’ll be like, well can we do a workaround that helps them get out of that bind? If you’ve got 20 to 30 people in your customer base asking for that, then that’s a clear indication that okay, we need to look at doing this, because that’s a large chunk of people that want to be able to do something about it, so let’s see if we can service that need. At which point again, you’ve got people, if they feel you’re listening to them, they’re willing to engage more.

Mala: Very true. What was the last time you had to persuade someone in authority to follow your suggestion? How did that work?

John: It’s quite easy here at Sentry because of the process we spoke about earlier with regards to opportunity assessments and backing up our decisions with facts.

Working collaboratively means that everybody buys into it, and then even if I may disagree with the ultimate decision, I know that we arrived at that decision through a robust and documented mechanism, and therefore I disagree with it ultimately, but I will back it, because that’s what we’ve come up with, and that’s the same with a number of my colleagues.

Mala: What are your favorite books, blogs, and other media, and how do you keep up?

John: Conferences, SQLSaturday, user groups—both attending and speaking. Speaking has made me a better learner and helped me understand technology. Europe and the United States have different views on the way things should be done from a data perspective. It helps having that balance.

From a blog’s perspective, Denny Cherry and Associates blog is a great source of information for me. Likewise, Paul Randal’s Wait Statistics library is something that I can’t thank him enough for spending the time to build.

Then obviously there are things like MSSQLTips. And I try to speak with people on Twitter. One thing I did use early on in my career was the SQLServerCentral site. Their Stairways series is very good.

Mala: I’m a big fan of that too.

John: It is particularly great if you actually want more structured learning.

Mala: What are your ways of stress management and developing healthy work/life balance?

John: Good question. I’ve got a couple of things that make work/life balance a little bit difficult. One is the amount of travel I do.

When it comes to kick back and relax, I play my Xbox. It’s a great mind-in-neutral thing. I also ride my motorcycle.

My wife, she’s in the industry as well. She just recently joined Microsoft, but she’s a consultant, so we do a lot of these things together. We go out for a nice long motorcycle ride in the countryside. We watch motorcycle races—British Superbikes, World Superbikes, and things like that.

Mala: You mentioned a little while ago about speaking and attending a lot of SQLSaturdays. What are some of the reasons you recommend people be involved with the community in general?

John: The community’s got a lot when it comes to learning. If you’re learning with others, it makes that learning process easier. I’ve been a lone DBA in a company. If you’ve not got anyone to bounce ideas off, it becomes a little more difficult, and you feel like there’s a lot more weight on your shoulders. The community gives you that pool of people you can bounce ideas off of.

There’s a lot of friendships to be made there as well. Otherwise, a blog is a fantastic way of building up your own knowledge base.

Mala: What are some of your favorite tools and techniques with SQL server, what do you use that you’re particularly fond of?

John: Plan Explorer. I’ve used that forever, even before I joined Sentry. RML Utilities. I’m a huge fan of it when it comes to minimizing workloads for performance, but also for migrations, using extended events or trace to capture the workload, and things like that, or just pushing all the metrics into a database to do your analysis on them. You’ve also got things like Next and PSS Diag, which are a little more obscure when it comes to troubleshooting. Another great resource is Glenn Berry’s scripts. Plan Explorer, DBA Tools, RML Utilities, and Glen’s scripts are probably my top four.

Mala: What has been your experience with the MVP program? What do you think you’ve gained out of it?

John: The interaction I have with the product group. The distribution lists and things like that where various discussions go on. It’s a lot of useful information. I’ve already met and spoken with a lot of the people that are on the MVP program. We can have a really good discussion around the technologies that are coming and what’s going on.

Mala: Do you have an interesting or funny story you’d like to share? Does not have to be work-related.

John: Yeah. It comes back to what I mentioned about stress management and work/life balance. My wife and I got married in August of 2017. We were looking for honeymoons. I just stumbled across a little advert on Facebook on riding Royal Enfield motorcycles in the Himalayas.

We’ve got our full bike licenses. Essentially, we flew into Delhi and had a fourteen-hour bus ride. It was one of the most terrifying bus journeys of my life. The roads with the sheer drops. From there, we spent ten days covering just over 1100 kilometers in some of the most incredible and beautiful scenery, riding Royal Enfield Motorcycles. It’s a fantastic experience for meeting the people, seeing the scenery, making new friends as part of the tour that we were on.

It was something that pushed us, not from a technical perspective, but getting out there and experiencing something completely different. It was fantastic. I will happily do something similar again, no doubt.

Mala: Thank you, John.

John: Not a problem, cheers Mala.