Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Small Leadership

I ran across Richard Branson’s top quotes on leadership. From a man who’s been quite a success in many areas, and has influenced many others, it was interesting to see what he considers good advice. He lists ten quotes from various others, some of which I’ve heard before. It’s an interesting mix, and these are certainly items that come from someone that could be considered a leader in business. I don’t know if that’s true, but certainly Mr. Branson is in charge of his company, and I believe that it is important for the management of a company to display leadership if they want to be successful.

Most of us, however, aren’t in management positions. Most of us might not want to ever be in management positions. Plenty of technical people prefer to remain in their roles as developers, DBAs, analysts and more. However, that desire doesn’t mean that better leadership skills wouldn’t make our jobs easier, or make us more successful.

The first quote in the story is this: “A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” That’s the quote of leadership that inspires, that helps others gain confidence and do more than they might otherwise. That’s the quote that shows a person who helps others is a great employee, not only because they get work done, but because they help others perform better.

Far too many managers don’t believe in their staff, and make the clear constantly. Those managers aren’t helping themselves or their company, as they’ll ensure most of their employees don’t do the best work they can. I’d encourage all of you to think about how you treat others. Think about what you say or do to encourage others to become better at their jobs. Perhaps there’s a little more you can to do lead others, and get more work done, while celebrating the success you can have together as a group of professionals.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

February 25, 2015
DLM Workshops
We’ve got a bunch of DLM workshops coming up in the next few months from Red Gate Software. We’ve been working on trying to bring some depth to our education, helping DBAs and developers learn how to built smoother software development pipelines for their databases.

The list of workshops is at http://www.red-gate.com/training/workshops/ and we’ll be updating it throughout the year. In this series, I’ll be at these events
- Mar 10 – Dublin
- Apr 10 – LA
Certainly more are coming later in the year that I’ll deliver or help out at.

We’ve built a series of three days of in depth instruction, each one building on the next. Our hope is to help you move through the subjects. Right now the days are covering these topics.
- Version Control for Databases
- Continuous Integration
- Automating Deployments
We are looking to try and schedule these over time in a city, so that you’ll be able to learn about VCS for databases, then come back in 3-4 months and take the next step to CI. We might do all three days consecutively, but it’s a lot to learn and cover, and I’d really hope that companies would learn one area, implement it, and then come back to learn the next step.

If you have requests for dates or cities, or even private instruction, let us know. We’re growing a list of partners as well because Grant and I can’t be everywhere, so we hope to be able to help more people learn ways to build software smoother and quicker.
February 24, 2015
Making Plans

I write regularly about career topics, hoping that I can help many of you think about your career more, learn more, and move in a direction that’s important to you. I’ve had a great career, one I’ve enjoyed most of the time, and think that pressing myself to become a better professional in many ways has been a large part of that. However I haven’t always had a formal plan, and don’t really have any long term goals in any detail.

I thought about this a bit in reading Kenneth Fisher’s interview of Tom LaRock. There’s a point where Ken asks Tom about his future plans and Tom paraphrases John Lennon to say he takes opportunities as they come and isn’t afraid to change directions in life.

As important as I think it is to continue to learn, and to move your career forward actively, I don’t think you need to do it all the time. I don’t think it’s a constant, every day effort that you make. There are times when you’re busy with life, or busy with work, and you may not have the extra energy or desire to pick up a book or write some T-SQL. That’s fine. Relax and enjoy your life.

Just don’t let those times stretch so far that your career stagnates. Make regular progress, not constant progress. Make plans, but live life as it passes. Make goals, but make them realistic, and pace yourself. Above all, don’t be afraid to change if that’s what’s right for you.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

February 24, 2015
Missing Full Text Extensions in Express

I was tasked recently with removing the full text indexes in Adventureworks for a demo. The full text indexes were causing a few extra items to appear in a SQL Compare demo and weren’t needed. The individual that had set up the VM I was using wasn’t sure what to do, so they asked me.

I logged on to AdventureWorks and right clicked the Production.Document table. I knew that had full text indexes because I’d tested them before. However, what I got was this:

The Full Text index part was grayed out. Strange, since the database was attached, and with a query, I could see FTS indexes below.

I suspected that the FTS extensions weren’t installed. I decided to check by running setup. When it started, I clicked the top item to "add features", as shown here.

That brought up a list of instances. The default is the top radio button below, but I selected the second one, which let me select an existing instance.

Next, I saw the features, and sure enough, FTS wasn’t checked.

I checked it and then clicked next to continue the installation.

Once this was done, I could run SSMS and sure enough, I could delete the FTS indexes (shown below).

I actually had two instances on this VM, but this FTS feature isn’t in SSMS. It comes from the instance. After I deleted these three indexes, I connected to the second instance and tried to delete the FTS indexes, but things were grayed out, as shown in the first image above.

I had to re-run setup for the second instance and add the FTS components there as well to delete the indexes from that database. Once that was done, I could easily delete all the FTS indexes and complete this simple task.

February 23, 2015