Hi! My name is Mika Sutinen and I work as a Lead Database Administrator and Product Owner for a Finnish company called Tieto. I’ve been with the company from 1998 and most of that time I’ve worked with our healthcare solution, now known as Lifecare. As a Microsoft Data Platform expert and a Product Owner, my daily work revolves around databases and related Data Platform technologies. I have also done quite a bit to introduce database DevOps tools and practices to our company.
Besides working in and with product development, I co-operate closely with our product support. As I have quite a lot of expertise with database administration, Windows servers, Failover Clustering, performance testing, etc. I sometimes get called to help with solving more problematic issues.
I’ve worked with a wide variety of software and technologies over the years, getting involved with SQL Server has definitely been the most rewarding experience so far. While SQL Server has played it’s part in my work for almost two decades, it was around 2010 when it became my number one interest.
I also blog when ever I find the time to do so. I mostly write about SQL Server and Windows administration, mostly because I find these two subjects tend to go hand in hand and they’re what I know the best. I’m also in Twitter (@SQLFinn)
Skills
I’ve been involved with IT for many years and in several different roles and positions that has helped me to gain a variety of skills.
Primary skills
- SQL Server Administration
- Windows Server Administration
- Windows Clustering
- Windows Troubleshooting
- Performance Monitoring
- Server Hardware
- Customer Support
- Agile/Scrum
Secondary skills
- Server Hardware
- Internet Information Services
- Performance Testing
- Virtualization
- Training
- Technical Writing
Training and Certifications
While I firmly believe in learning by doing I’ve also participated to several courses over the years. Other forms of training I’ve participated in include few conferences for database professionals such as PASS Summit and SQLRally Nordic and a good number of PASS virtual chapter sessions. Besides that I do follow a fair amount of SQL Server blogs and discussion forums.
I’ve only listed the most important courses and conferences from the past four years on this page, I have also attended other (most often Microsoft led) workshops that are not listed on this page.
Conferences and courses
- SQL Server: AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances – Setup and Configuration
- PASS Summit 2017
- PASS Summit 2016
- PASS Summit 2015
- PASS Summit 2014
- MS Workshop: SQL Server 2012 Advanced Management and Monitoring
- MS Workshop: SQL Server 2012 Features for Administrators
Certifications
- ITIL v3
- Scrum Product Owner
The work I’ve done
I’ve had the privilege of being involved in many large-scale healthcare IT projects. I’ve listed here the ones that I would consider to be the most challenging ones.
Central Finland Health Care District
I’ve been working with Central Finland Health Care District ever since they started to use our Effica product, I believe this was back in 2005. My responsibility in the delivery project was the design and implementation of the technical infrastructure.
Even more notable project however, would be the combining of multiple (15) patient record systems to single one back in 2011. It was the first time something like that was ever done and the result was the largest patient record system we had designed and build using our product. In this project my responsibility was to make certain that the customer had necessary infrastructure in place to support the increased amount of users as well as to make sure the copying of patient data could be done as quickly and safely as possible.
Monitoring Service
I’m responsible for designing and implementing a monitoring service that we offer to our customers. The proof of concept was done together with the Eastern Finland Health Care District and it’s now being implemented to all our customers. Currently we’re already using it to monitor over 200 servers running patient critical software.
Database DevOps
One of the more challenging projects I have ever worked with was to introduce DevOps into our daily database development. The work involved finding the tools and coming up with the processes to implement things such as Continuous Integration and Test Automation to very traditional database development model.
What I enjoy about my work and how I work
I believe that it’s important to continue learning throughout your career and finding ways to improve my skills and knowledge is what I find exciting (though I have to say that sometimes studying while working full-time feels like pure madness!). So when ever I work on something I look for ways to challenge myself and the way we currently do things. This personality trait also makes me prone to accepting new and difficult tasks rather easily.
As for working environment, for that I have no real preference. I’m equally comfortable working alone, with co-worker or part of a team. I also don’t mind working directly with customers, in fact, early on my career most of my work was done on-site with the customers. While most of the work these days can be done remotely it’s occasionally nice to meet some of the customers who you go way back with and reminisce about the long days and often also nights working together.
I’ve also received lot of positive feedback from my former and current colleagues and managers, some of that feedback can be found from my LinkedIn profile.
