19 Years as a DBA → Building a Product. Hello, DEV Community!
I spent nearly two decades managing databases before deciding to build the tool I always wished existed. Here's my story and what I'll be writing about.
Hey DEV Community 👋
My name is Abd, and I'm genuinely glad to finally be here.
A bit about me
I've spent 19 years working as a Database Administrator — starting at a time when "the cloud" wasn't yet a thing and databases lived in physical racks you could walk up and touch.
Over those years I've worked with pretty much every database engine that matters: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, Redshift, BigQuery, Spanner — and watched the industry shift from on-prem to hybrid to full cloud and then to "we're on three clouds and nobody planned this."
My last role before going the founder route was Staff Database Engineer — the kind of job where you're not just managing databases but setting the patterns that entire engineering organizations follow.
Along the way I got certified in Data Science from the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo in Canada, which pushed me to think differently about what databases are actually for — not just storing data, but making it accessible and useful to the people who need it.
Why I decided to build something
After nearly two decades, the problem I kept running into — at every company, at every scale — was the same one:
Nobody actually knows what databases they're running.
Not fully. Not across all their accounts, all their clouds, all their engines. The bigger the company, the worse it got. And when someone needed to query that data, they had to either write SQL from memory or file a ticket and wait.
I tried to solve this internally at every company I worked at. Spreadsheets, internal tooling, wikis. Nothing stuck. Nothing scaled.
So I decided to build it properly.
What I'm building
I'm the Founder & CEO of 1DataCloud — a unified hybrid cloud database management platform.
The short version: one dashboard for all your databases across AWS, GCP, MongoDB Atlas, and on-prem. Connect your cloud credentials, see every instance in one place, then query any of them in plain English using our AI layer called Query1AI — which reads your schema automatically and generates the SQL for you.
No agents. No scripts. Read-only by default. Operational in minutes.
It's the tool I spent 19 years wishing existed.
What I'll be writing about here
I'm planning to post regularly on topics I know well and care about:
- Multi-cloud database management — the operational reality of running databases across AWS, GCP, and on-prem simultaneously
- AI-powered querying — how natural language → SQL actually works in practice, and where it falls short today
- DBA life — lessons from nearly two decades managing production databases (there are some stories)
- Founder journey — building a B2B SaaS as a technical founder, what I'm learning, what I got wrong
- Cloud database deep dives — RDS vs Cloud SQL, Spanner's consistency model, Redshift gotchas, and more
If any of those topics sound useful, follow along — I'll be posting consistently.
A question for the community
What's the hardest part of managing databases at your current company? Is it visibility across environments, schema drift, slow queries, cross-team access, something else entirely?
I've got 19 years of opinions on this and I'd love to hear where others are struggling — drop it in the comments.
Looking forward to being part of this community properly. 🙏