VI

About the practice

Named for the six columns of Mizzou's Francis Quadrangle — gold outside, white in.

Six Column Solutions advises teams on data infrastructure: architecture and fractional DBA work, disaster recovery, cloud migrations, FinOps, SQL Server on managed cloud platforms, and distributed SQL. Engagements are project-based or retainer, with a focus on production systems that have to stay up and stay affordable.

Principal

The work, and a little of the life around it. A full chronology is on the resume.

Shand T. Glenn

Founder and principal consultant · Columbia, Missouri

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and AWS Certified Database Specialty. More than twenty years designing, operating, and migrating database platforms for insurance, financial services, retail, and cloud-native product organizations.

Away from the data layer I live in Columbia with my wife and our three girls. We are a barbecue family. Saturdays are Mizzou football, summers are Cardinals baseball, and the rest of the week I try to stay honest on the road — running and biking when the work and the weather allow.

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • AWS Certified Database Specialty
ResumeLinkedIn

I started in insurance systems — COBOL and DB2 at American National Property & Casualty — then spent the next decade as a SQL Server specialist at Jack Henry & Associates and Veterans United Home Loans. That meant large estates: more than a thousand SQL Server instances in one chapter, two hundred clustered servers in another, plus high availability, replication, and disaster recovery that had to be demonstrated, not assumed.

From 2020 to 2022 I was a Database Consultant and then a Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, helping customers move Microsoft database workloads to RDS and Aurora — migrations, licensing, performance, infrastructure as code, and recovery design. Chewy, Cockroach Labs, and FairCom came after that: managed-cloud pipelines, distributed SQL professional services, and legacy ISAM in cloud architectures.

I currently serve as Staff Database Engineer at Array, responsible for a roughly 500TB SQL Server environment, migrations to Google Cloud SQL and AlloyDB, ClickHouse on Kubernetes, and FinOps work that has reduced GCP database and analytics spend by more than $100,000 a year. Six Column Solutions is the practice I built alongside that path — fractional DBA, migration, recovery, and cost work for teams that need someone who has already been on the other side of the ticket.

One outcome I still point to: an Aurora PostgreSQL workload whose daily cost dropped 78% after we aligned the pricing model with the I/O pattern, not after another round of query tuning. The same standard applies to recovery. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup.

  • SQL Server architecture and operations at enterprise scale
  • Migrations to AWS (RDS, Aurora) and GCP (Cloud SQL, AlloyDB)
  • Distributed SQL evaluation and adoption (CockroachDB)
  • Disaster recovery design, runbooks, and restore testing
  • Cloud database FinOps, including Aurora I/O and instance right-sizing