Who We Are and What We Actually Do
We started Lorineikora because we kept meeting talented people who couldn't break into database administration despite having the aptitude. The barrier wasn't intelligence — it was access to practical experience that actually resembled real work environments.
Our founder, Helena Petrov, spent years managing database systems for hospitals and financial institutions. She noticed that most training programs taught SQL syntax but skipped the messy reality of production environments, performance troubleshooting, and system recovery.
Our Beginning
Started With a Simple Question
Back in 2019, Helena was consulting with a healthcare network that desperately needed database administrators. They'd interviewed dozens of candidates with certifications but couldn't find anyone who understood how to handle their actual problems.
The disconnect was obvious. Schools were teaching concepts, but workplaces needed people who could walk into a crisis and know what to check first. That's when she decided to build something different — a program where students work on scenarios pulled directly from real incidents.
What Makes Us Different
Three Core Principles
We're not trying to reinvent education. We just believe that if you want to train database administrators, you should probably teach them how databases actually break and how to fix them under pressure.
Real Database Incidents
From Production Environments
Every scenario in our curriculum is based on something that actually happened. Query timeouts that brought down a checkout system. Index corruption discovered at 3am. Migration failures that required emergency rollbacks.
We don't sanitize the chaos. Students learn to diagnose problems with incomplete information, time pressure, and stakeholders asking for updates every ten minutes.
Industry Professionals Teaching
Active Database Administrators
Our instructors aren't full-time educators — they're working DBAs who teach part-time. This means the advice they give isn't from a textbook written in 2015. It's what they did last month when their replication setup failed.
Students get answers to questions that only make sense once you've been responsible for keeping a system running. The kind of knowledge that doesn't fit neatly into lesson plans.
Job-Ready Portfolio Projects
Evidence of Actual Skills
By the time students finish, they've documented solutions to complex problems. Performance optimization case studies. Disaster recovery implementations. Security audit responses with remediation plans.
When they interview for positions, they can walk through specific technical decisions they've made. That's more convincing than listing certifications.
How Our Program Actually Works
Six to Nine Months of Applied Learning
This isn't a bootcamp where you cram syntax for twelve weeks. It's structured more like an apprenticeship, where you progressively handle more complex situations as your judgment improves.
Foundation Phase
Database Fundamentals Through Troubleshooting
Most programs start with theory. We start with a broken database and work backwards to understand why it's broken. You learn SQL by writing queries to investigate performance problems. You learn normalization by fixing poorly designed schemas.
This phase takes about eight weeks. Students work with PostgreSQL and MySQL, since those are what most organizations actually use. By the end, you can read execution plans, understand transaction isolation, and explain why an index made things worse instead of better.
Operations Phase
Running Systems in Production-Like Environments
Now you're responsible for keeping databases operational. Monitoring, backups, replication, failover procedures. We simulate real infrastructure with actual load patterns and occasional failures.
You'll experience what it's like when backup verification fails during a restore. Or when a primary node goes down and you need to promote a replica. These situations test whether you understand the concepts deeply enough to adapt.
Specialization Phase
Deep Work on Complex Challenges
Students choose an area to focus on based on their interests: performance optimization, high availability architecture, security hardening, or cloud migrations. You work on a substantial project that could serve as a case study in a job interview.
One recent student rebuilt a reporting system that was crushing the primary database. Another designed a multi-region replication setup with conflict resolution. Another conducted a security audit and implemented encryption at rest.
Professional Readiness
Portfolio Review and Career Preparation
The final phase is about presentation. You document your work in a way that demonstrates technical competence to hiring managers. We review your portfolio, conduct mock technical interviews, and help you articulate what you've learned.
This isn't job placement — we don't promise employment. But we do make sure you can explain your capabilities clearly and provide evidence of your skills when opportunities arise.
Next Steps
Ready to Start Learning Database Administration?
Our next cohort begins enrollment soon. Classes are small — usually fifteen to twenty students — because effective mentorship requires actually knowing the people you're teaching.
If you're curious whether this program is right for you, reach out. We're happy to discuss your background and whether our approach matches what you're looking for. Not everyone needs what we offer, and that's fine.
We're looking for people who are genuinely interested in database systems and willing to work through challenging problems. Prior experience helps but isn't required — we've trained former teachers, retail managers, and recent graduates.
