I fix slow databases for a living.

My story

I'm Arturs Irbitis, a senior software developer based in Riga, Latvia. For the past 10 years, I've been building and optimising database systems for one of the largest banks in the Nordics.

My daily work involves processing thousands of financial transactions under strict regulatory deadlines — systems where every millisecond matters and downtime is not an option. I've built complete SEC and SFTR reporting systems from scratch, optimised queries that reduced processing from 15 minutes to under 2 minutes, and written 881 automated tests to make sure nothing breaks.

"These aren't hard problems to fix — if you know where to look. That's what I do."

I started DataCraft Consulting because I kept seeing the same problems outside of banking: companies running SQL Server databases that were set up years ago and never properly tuned. Queries that take minutes when they should take seconds. Indexes that were created by someone who left the company three jobs ago. Configuration settings still at their defaults.

I work primarily with C# and SQL Server. My stack includes .NET 6+, Dapper, Akka.NET, Azure DevOps, and a lot of T-SQL. I'm pragmatic about technology — I use what works reliably in production, not what's trending on Hacker News.

Outside of work, I'm based in Riga and enjoy digging into physics and electrical engineering when I have spare time.