“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos

The date is June 6th 2018. Our producer Louise has just setup a slack channel called #dbale with the topic: “Hi, thought i’d just set this up as it might be the easiest way to chat about the podcast idea at this early stage.” purely off the back of a conversation we had after a practice run for this webinar where I suggested to Chris and Lou that I loved working with the 2 of them, and that we should do some kind of podcast together.

We produced our first DBAle episode and it went live around the 12th July 2018, the production quality was very low, like abysmal and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but it was up. It had it’s own landing page, we were on Spotify and Google Play Music. It was “a thing”.

Little did we know though, it started something. I will never try to quantify that something because it was a weird something, something that could only be produced by 2 Chris’ getting in front of a microphone, drinking a beer and talking about data.

There are a hundred different podcasts out there that are super good if you’re looking to learn more about data like SQL Data Partners or Dear SQL DBA and we wanted to be a bit different. So fortunately people are able to join us on our own journey of discovery and also have a laugh on the way!

Fortunately, as a podcast backed by Redgate we get the added benefit of having access to some superstars as well, like episode 17 with the incredible Steve Jones, or the live episode with the incredible Chris Yates. I have to admit I’m very excited for the next few episodes for this very reason! Look out for February’s episode as it’s sure to be wonderful, and hopefully we’ll even persuade none other than Kendra Little herself to join us soon! (Hint, Kendra, hint!!)

I guess this blog post wasn’t to give insight into how to sustain a podcast, keep motivated or even what the formula for success is, as I’m not sure we know any of these (at least 1 point would be invest in a good microphone, we found that out the hard way). But there is one thing I do know, we keep doing what we love and at time of writing we are at 5,300 unique downloads, so I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us, thank you to everyone who has been on or helped produce the show, and a massive thank you to everyone who has listened.

Here’s to the next 5000 listens, a year of fun, beer and friendship… oh and data. Here’s a picture of the crate of beer and scratch off bucket list Redgate (thanks Louise!) got us for hitting the 5,000 mark:

P.S. Everyone asks me what my favorite episode of DBAle was so far, so if you’re interested then check out these two (as I couldn’t pick!)

Servers that go bump in the night(time): https://www.red-gate.com/hub/events/online-events/dbale-05-servers-go-bump-nighttime

Monitor the state of the 8%: https://www.red-gate.com/hub/events/online-events/dbale-09-monitor-the-state-of-the-8