There are a lot of technology people looking for jobs these days, especially after all the layoffs that have occurred in 2023. At the same time, I have a number of friends and clients that are struggling to hire qualified people. They get lots of candidates, but they are dismayed at how little the candidates they interview seem to know, or at least how little candidates know in the areas that their organization has needs.
Today, I want to help people get better at growing and managing their careers. Therefore I’m asking those of you that are employed to describe your job. Give us your title in the comments and then list 5-10 things that you’ve done lately. What types of queries have you written? What tasks did you complete with SQL Server or Azure SQL? Have you needed to research something to solve a problem? What knowledge or concepts helped you complete a task?
The idea is to share some of the skills or concepts a person should have to grow their career. Hopefully, some people will then read descriptions and build skills from this list. They’ll try to accomplish the tasks you’ve had to finish, hopefully documenting or blogging about their work.
As an example, I’ll give a few tech things I’ve seen lately from clients. These are practical things someone needed to finish, or something they asked someone else to do.
I was working with a client and there was a need to find all the logins whose passwords were not set to expire. How can you do that?
Another had a table had a lot of duplicate data, and all duplicates but the row with the latest date needed to be deleted. What does the DELETE statement look like? Caveat, what if I need to update all but the first row (newest) with a new value in some column to mark them as inactive?
A client needed to get a list of all the servers from their central management server (CMS) and then extract that list as a CSV file. They were using this for some audit purposes.
At another client, a developer needed to clone a git repository and then open the .sql files in Azure Data Studio. Can you show how to do this?
A DBA wanted to decide whether you choose a clustered or non-clustered index for a table that contains sales information and is often queried for a few rows based on a date. Why would one index be better than the other?
Don’t answer these questions, as this is homework for others. However, if you could share a list of things you would expect your new coworker to know or solve, that will help us raise the bar for what we expect from our colleagues.
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
I’m not much use in this area because of how vertical the market I work in is; Property Management with a very specific PM mgt software system. Yes my T-SQL skills/knowledge would be applicable in any scenario dealing with SQL Server but it’s my deep knowledge/experience (20 years) of this one product that is teh market leader and how it’s database works that is why I’ve only been recruited and not had to look for a job in many years. That aside and pretending it’s not scenario specific here are the things I do
1) Data Troubleshooting: tracking down (often via profiler) what’s going on, where and why when the software vendor either is unable to explain or simply won’t. On more than 1 occasion we’ve caught them saying one thing when reality was another. I also hunt down financial discrepancies that the accountants/auditors can’t find from within the front end of the system and even a few instances of fraud.
2) Custom Report work – In the past this has mainly been with Crystal Reports ( the best Report Builder ever IMHO ) however the software we use offers up some custom options that involve a mix of Excel and T-SQL with a slight touch in SSRS which I initially tried to embrace but became incredibly frustrated with. I know it’s popular but at the price to use it the thing is hard not to want to use. It has gotten better over the years but SSRS feels like a Custom Report framework built not by business report writers but developers/coders.
3) Data Fixes: As well as tracking down issues there are numerous data fixes. It’s about %70/%30 split between the fixes I come up with and the ones we get from the vendor who’s software we use but even when it’s from them I review it and often have to change it because I have stricter guidelines about changes then they do. For example no update is a singular mass update nor does any update ever not include the pre-update values in the criteria. I also ALWAYS use Beg/Try to ensure either all changes are a go or none are.
4) Solutions Archeologist: I know it’s silly sounding but I don’t know what else to call it. This is typically where we have a problem in which the solution is not merely some data fix but requires me and others to kind of brainstorm to find ways to solve some challenge. We’ve achieved this using anything from an Excel macro to Microsoft PowerApps platform. And of courts traditional T-SQL solutions like triggers, stored procedures, jobs and more.
5) Watchdog: I am very vigilante about making sure nothing is done haphazardly by anyone with regards to the data. This use to be easier when we had it all on prem but with the data in the vendors cloud my access is much more limited. That said I still keep an eye on anything that’s done outside the programs interface this includes 3rd party vendors who interface with the data via a vendor provided API like resource. Randomly I just look for stuff that appears to be off and investigate. We’ve proactively fixed a number of data issues we weren’t aware of because they had not yet triggered any issues. I also stay on top of my own boss and his boss on things like license expiration as I know it’s easy for them to get bogged down and forget something simple. I try to approach my job like as if I owned some portion of the business and thus how would I want things to be protected and working as best as they can.
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