I have worked with 2 databases for the last 15 years which are Sybase and SQL Server.

Sybase

I moved to Sybase 15.5 at the start of 2011 from Sybase 12 which I worked on for a number of years. I worked with existing code, table and index definitions to improve performance and reliability as well as robustness. I also built a number of stored procedures, tables and process for all my projects. My involvement with Sybase for improvements were to look at existing indexes, see which ones could be removed, reduced deadlocking by 75% by investigating and improving the locks on the main tables, stored procedure performance making alterations to row at a time to set at a time processing. All of this came about due to the massive rise in volumes of transactions that occurred once I joined the team and where as the database was working well prior to the increase in volumes, processing times increased and so changes had to be made. Also how the data within the database was used altered dramatically and therefore changes were required to accomodate this. I used Embacadero DBArtisan to connect to Sybase although the release procedures that I built and put in place for the team used C-Shell scripts that ran raw T-SQL scripts via Linux ISQL.

SQL Server

I dabbled with SQL Server 7.0 but really started to work with SQL Server with SQL Server 2000. I had been working with Visual FoxPro prior to this but I had a project to work with Visual Basic to connect to SQL Server for a US based firm and this was a good opportunity to get to grips with this product. I was also during this time fortunate enough to be asked to write a beginners book on SQL Server by Wrox Press (the incaranation before moving to receivership and being bought by O'Reilly). I have been involved in projects with SQL Server to store a 15 minute delay trade price feed, a "heart beat" monitor system, as well as help build a basic SSIS system that formed the basis for holding data to be used for an OLAP system. I have also built a system that loaded in Word documents in to SQL Server and were the indexed for Full-Text searching. The front end was in ASP.NET using SQL Server for working with searches, displaying the results and allowing the Word document to be downloaded from SQL Server as a PDF.