Welcome to the official website and blog of Chris Umbel, database administrator and software developer.

Back in '99 I began my career as a programmer for Indianer Computer Corporation (ICC), a small custom software shop in Pittsburgh, PA. We worked on projects ranging from small websites to wearable computers to large enterprise software. Our customer base included small start-ups (and there were many in those days) and Ford motor company. While we were primarily a Microsoft shop employing the typical Microsoft tools like ASP, VB, SQL Server and Access we also dabbled in Java and Oracle.

Within a year I was promoted to senior programmer at the ripe old age of 21. At that point I began to work on architectural design, advanced development and perform a little bit of project management.

In 2001 we spun of Unicentric which developed systems intended for health and human services oriented non-profits. Gradually Unicentric assumed our entire focus and absorbed ICC. My primary responsibility was building an extensible platform based on ASP.Net and SQL Server that would accommodate the case documentation needs of nearly any client without the need for writing code.

Over the years my interest in databases (and large amounts of data in general) grew and I became interested in a position as a DBA. I was hired in 2007 by DVD Empire as their loan DBA (the position which I currently hold) and have become responsible for the majority of the data of the company. My duties include T-SQL development, disaster recovery, optimization, database design, data warehousing, business intelligence, performance tuning, and a bit of architecture design. I also squeeze in some linux system administration and a little desktop and web application work in there as well.

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and still reside there. I'm married, and have two kids, eight and four years old. I enjoy tennis, stock trading, and of course, computing.

Tags:
linq .Net performance sql 2008 sql server powershell indexes scripting reporting services filestream ruby ironruby entity framework EF testing .net framework 4.0 ADO.NET SSRS rs setpolicies vb cte c# podcasts webdav exchange server data warehousing Data Services Web Services Astoria jQuery database object oriented cql refactoring remoting simpledb cloud HTML GObject GNOME Vala BI couchdb django ORM python erlang functional C curl stackless concurrency Groovy Java JVM dynamic tools windows ironpython dlr systems programming go CAPTCHA appengine natural language full-text rails lucene wave clr parallel virtualization Oracle iPhone xml Objective-C Haiku security cocoa touch C++ BeOS Operating Systems Lucene monitoring Solr lisp VS 2010
Blog History:
Solrnet, a Solr Client Library for .Net - 03/08/2010
Monitoring Solr with LucidGaze - 02/21/2010
Haiku, an Open Source Continuation of BeOS - 02/10/2010
Basic Authentication with a NSURLRequest in Cocoa Touch - 01/24/2010
Asynchronous Programming in Cocoa Touch - 01/17/2010
NSXML-like XPath Support in Cocoa Touch with TouchXML - 01/03/2010
Using Solr in Django for Full-Text Searching via Solango - 01/01/2010
Using Entity Framework with Oracle - 12/22/2009
Solutions to Common VirtualBox Problems - 12/20/2009
Parallel Programming with the Task Parallel Library and PLINQ in .Net 4.0 - 12/14/2009
Clojure, A Lisp for the JVM and CLR - 12/13/2009
Google Wave Robots in Java - 12/07/2009
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching - 12/05/2009
Full-Text Indexing in Ruby Using Ferret - 11/28/2009
Home-Brewing a Full-Text Search in Google's AppEngine - 11/22/2009
Using reCAPTCHA With Django - 11/21/2009
Phat Go Code Launched - 11/19/2009
A Little More of Google's Go - 11/17/2009
First Impressions of Go, Google's New Systems Language - 11/14/2009
Scripting Your .Net Applications with IronPython - 11/03/2009
Windows Services in Python - 11/02/2009
My Tool List - 10/26/2009
Groovy: Dynamic Language for the JVM... Groovy! - 10/23/2009
Easy Concurrency with Stackless Python - 10/03/2009
C from erlang via linked-in driver - 09/16/2009
Templating with NDjango - 09/06/2009
A little bit o' Erlang - 08/23/2009
Tale of a Website, from Rails to ASP.NET to Django - 08/20/2009
Now in Django - 08/19/2009
Stored Procedures in Django - 08/09/2009
CouchDBExtension - 08/06/2009
POCO Entities in ADO.NET 4.0 - 07/30/2009
Accessing SimpleDB from SSRS - 07/22/2009
Easy GNOME Development with the Vala Programming Language - 07/16/2009
HTML Parsing with Ruby and Nokogiri - 07/12/2009
Amazon SimpleDB Batched PUTs Usage and Performance - 07/10/2009
PowerShell 2.0 Out-GridView, ISE and ScriptCmdlets - 07/05/2009
Asynchronous and remote execution with powershell 2 ctp3 - 06/30/2009
Understanding Source Code with NDepend and CQL - 06/22/2009
Object Oriented Databases with db4o - 06/07/2009
ADO.Net Data Services with jQuery - 05/29/2009
Exchange webdav automation - 05/26/2009
Podcasts - 05/26/2009
Linq to Object Performance - 05/11/2009
SQL 2008 and powershell - 01/25/2009
SQL 2008 filtered indexes - 06/11/2008
SQL 2008's table valued parameters - 05/11/2008
SQL 2008's MERGE statement - 04/22/2008
ironruby - 04/11/2008
SSRS scripting with RS.EXE - 11/20/2007
SQL 2008 FILESTREAM - 08/04/2007
CTE Concatenation - 01/01/2007