Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Sabbatical

    It’s time.

    At least, it’s the year for me. I’ve worked at Red Gate for 5 years now and I’ve earned a 6 week sabbatical. My boss asked me recently what I might do, and I wasn’t sure. I haven’t really thought much about what I’d want to do with a sabbatical, and so I did what and modern IT pro would do: I asked Twitter.

    It didn’t turn out so well, but perhaps because I hadn’t defined very well what a sabbatical is. It’s not a vacation, and not a 6 week break from work involving the XBOX. Our CEO scored a number of sabbaticals (see the image below from the Book of Red Gate) in terms of what they accomplished. As you can see from the scores, the idea of the sabbatical is that is provides you a break from work, but that break should be spent somehow trying to improve or grow yourself.

    sabbaticals

    Note that this isn’t necessarily based on work, though it could be. For example, I could write a book, or make a serious attempt. I have had a few ideas, such as spending six weeks working for a charity full time. Perhaps I could find an intensive course in some subject that I’d tackle for short period of time. There are lots of choices, but I have a few restrictions as well.

    I can’t travel and leave home for a substantial period of time. My wife’s business is busy during the summer and I need to be available to help manage the ranch and kids. I also travel enough that I’m not looking to be out of town more than I already am. It also isn’t a once in a lifetime event (hopefully), so I’m not looking to spend $10,000 or more for some growth at this point in my life.

    I am looking for ideas from people, as are a few others that have sabbaticals available from Red Gate.  I have options, but I’d like to think deeply about the pros and cons of my choices, and take this seriously as a chance for personal growth. Six weeks isn’t a lot of time, but it’s more than I’ve ever taken at a time away from work in decades. I greatly appreciate the opportunity that Red Gate is giving me, and don’t want to squander my time, or their money.

    Note: lots of companies offer sabbaticals as a benefit, including Microsoft.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Lemonade and Life

    I’ve got a torn ACL. I found out yesterday at a visit with a surgeon that gave me the results of his exam and an MRI I had last week.

    Don’t feel too bad for me. I’ve had this for (I’m guessing) eleven years. In that time I’ve

    • run every day for over 4 years,
    • studied karate for 5 years and earned a black belt
    • snowboarded over 150 days
    • played 6 seasons of baseball at all positions outside of pitcher/catcher
    • played volleyball
    • practiced yoga and Pilates
    • picked up and carried my kids plenty of times
    • played weekly volleyball for over a year.

    I’ve done plenty more and felt fairly normal. The knee has been slightly unstable at times, but I’ve just limited, not eliminated, activity.

    I need to get this fixed. It’s becoming a problem, and it aches fairly constantly. It also limits my ability to engage in some activities that I think are important for my long term health. Not having an ACL also potentially means that I am hastening future issues as I age. It’s a fairly routine and simple surgery, and I should be walking on my own inside a week. The downside is that I can’t fly for 4 weeks afterwards because of potential blood clot issues.

    This means I need a 4 week hole in my schedule, which can be hard to find. I may cancel or miss some events, and I’ll apologize in advance now. I’ll give as much notice as possible, but something will have to give, and it will likely be in the Apr/May/June time frame.

    Let’s be clear. I’m not complaining here. My life is amazing and I couldn’t ask for things to be going better. This is, at worst, a minor hassle in my life. Surgery is dangerous, and there could be complications, and I’ll lose a few weeks of activity, but that’s a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. I’ll get this fixed and move on.

    Life does throw issues at you. Many of you have had much worse situations than this minor injury. I’ve had worse things for sure, and I try to remember that the trials and troubles I face are a part of life. I can let them get me down, and sometimes they do, but I can also look past them and remember all the good in life I’ve had, and look forward to the good things I’ll find later.

     

  • The Holiday Challenge

    It seems as though I’ve seen many protests and complaints this past holiday season about the extra hours the some retailers were requiring of employees. It started in the US just before Thanksgiving with protests about some stores opening on Thanksgiving day, and it continued through the Christmas season as a few brick and mortar companies decided to stay open 24 hours a day until the holiday.
    For most of us that work in technology, the holidays can be a mixed blessing. We could have a slow time, as other people in the office work less and make less demands of us. We could also be more busy as the slow times mean opportunities for maintenance or enhancements. I’ve even had extremely busy times as we worked the New Year’s holiday to get applications ready for use on Jan 1.
    There was a survey recently and a report that said many IT people don’t get a break during the holidays. They find themselves on call, or responding over the holidays when things break. I’ve certainly experienced this, especially when managers have viewed holidays as a perfect time to take systems down that are otherwise being used heavily by our business. I suspect that much of the impact to IT depends on your particular business and how your systems are used during holidays. If you work at Amazon, I wouldn’t expect to have holidays off.
    The one thing that the survey mentioned people wanted to see changed most was a reduction in the amount of fire-fighting that they perform. It’s no fun when things are permanently broken, and even less fun when you respond to the same issue over and over without actually fixing something once. I certainly have found myself looking for other employment when the amount of fire-fighting time exceeds the amount of enhancement time.
    I hope that the holidays were not too stressful or busy for you, and you have a bit of a break. If not, perhaps it’s time to think about how you might want to change things for next year.
    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Powershell in a Month – Day 7 Adding Commands

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Post holidays, day 7 looks at the shell itself and adding in snap-ins and modules. I have to say that the first time I looked at Powershell was in SQL Server 2008 when there was a “mini-shell”, but I didn’t understand what the difference was. I’m sure I’ve read other explanations, but they didn’t make as much sense. Perhaps because I’m more focused this time on learning PoSh it made sense? Not sure.

    In any case. This chapter starts to explain, and emphasize, there is really only one shell for PoSh. This is in contrast to the earlier SQL implementation, but moving forward, everything will be in one shell. The various shortcuts you find for different Microsoft tools and features are the same shell with an “Import-Module” parameter passed in. This is the same way in which the MMC works, and it’s the same way that we often configure other tools, like SSMS and VS, which have add-ins.

    That’s interesting, and good to know. This means I can not only customize my PoSh environment, but I can set up custom environments that can be shared on all computers in an organization or group. That is one of the main concerns I’ve had with PoSh. If I change my environment on my laptop to do things, I need to be sure all the places I’ll deploy the scripts to have the same environment.

    The chapter also look at snap-ins and modules, which are different. In my earlier work with PoSh, the idea of snap-ins seemed to be a pain, almost like installing Perl on every machine. Snap-ins need to be pre-installed and registered on the computer to be added in. The examples in the chapter load the SQL Server snap-ins, though the chapter mentions that snap-ins are not the way forward. Modules are.

    Modules are more like self-contained items that do not need to be installed. They just need to be in the PoSh path (environmental variable) or loaded with the full disk path. If the modules exist in the PoSh environmental variable, then they are auto loaded.

    The rest of the chapter is really devoted to some practice with modules and loading them. There are brief sections that look at how you can pre-configure your own environment automatically with a configuration file that allows you to pre-load modules or specify settings. That can be handy, especially as you add a series of modules to your setup. That also seems like something that you might want to deploy to all servers, or all members of a team, in order to ensure that any scripts you have written will run.