Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Cloudy Future

    crystal ball
    Can you divine what’s important for your career in the future?

    Those of us in Information Technology are constantly learning to do more with the tools and platforms we have. There are no shortages of new systems to manage. Since staffing levels never increase as quickly as servers, we must find ways to manage and maintain more and more systems all the time. That’s fine since tools like Powershell or MultiScript allow us to extend our reach to many machines as easily as we work with one machine. That’s not quite accurate since the effort to build a repeatable process is greater than performing a task one time, however I have found that most of the time if I need to perform a process once, I’ll need to do it again.

    Over time I’ve learned that investing in my own skills, and learning to work smarter and more efficiently, has paid dividends for me. Becoming more familiar with the business my employer is involved in has helped me to return more value to the company, as well as ensure that my employment is appreciated. As companies look to virtualize systems, move to cloud services, or find some other more efficient way of dealing with computing resources, it’s up to each of us to find new ways that we can provide value. That’s what system administrators need to do, and I suspect DBAs need to be thinking along these lines as well.

    The world is getting more complex from an IT perspective. These days companies have their pick of candidates for many jobs, and the person that has a variety of skills in multiple areas with a history of solving problems is desirable. Even when companies have few candidates, they seem to be waiting to hire a candidate that is a good fit rather than picking the first person they find if that person lacks some of the skills the company needs.

    As you continue along the path of your professional development, think about adding a variety of skills in different areas, skills that improve your efficiency, and allow the business to get more of their work done every day.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Sleepless in Seattle – SQL in the City 2012

    seattle_20081115_cA few years ago I went to Seattle a few days before the PASS Summit started. I took my middle son and we spent 3 days wandering around Seattle, seeing some amazing sights. We went to the Museum of Flight and the Underground Tour, along with a few other places and had a great time. This year I’ll be going early again, and I’ll get to spend a day with my oldest son, who lives in Seattle.

    However I’ll also be getting to work early. SQL in the City is coming to Seattle on Monday, November 5, 2012 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. It’s just a short walk from the Convention Center on the water, and we’ll have another great lineup of speakers.

    If you are coming to the Summit, and would like a free day of sessions on Monday, sign up and come down. We’ll do training the Red Gate way, with great speakers, topics, discussions, debates, and food.

    This will be the end of our 2012 tour, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of our SQL Star beer available at the end of the day. Register and come on down if you will be free on Monday.

    I’ll likely be in town on Saturday, and I’ll be going hard. I will likely get a run in early in the morning before the event, but I’ll be jogging along the water on Tuesday as well, so catch me on Twitter if you want to tag along.

    Register today.

  • The Dream Machine

    I could replace my desktop since I have a similar setup

    Hardware is usually important to techies. I see now shortage of discussions and debates about this laptop or that. I see people asking about this machine or that ( the W530 looks niiiiiiiccccceee) and as various Surface tablets are announced, I often find people blogging about what they like or debating the merits on Twitter. In the SQL Server world, there are a few very impressive hardware setups at people’s homes.

    I ran across this post about life at Stripe and there was one benefit listed that caught my eye. In the post, the author says “New employees are asked to send in specifications for their dream machine, which is then built and waiting for them on their first day.” I think that’s a great benefit, and it shows that the company values their employees and wants to ensure they start off with a little excitement.

    This Friday I wanted to ask you what you’d do if that were offered to you. Most of us working for corporations get the same type of machine as all other technical employees, but imagine that isn’t the case.

    What machine would you specify if your boss gave you the choice?

    Personally I like my MacBook Air. It’s small, light, comes on instantly, and I find myself really enjoying OSX. The one thing it lacks is some horsepower, and if I need more I’d have to look at either one of the new Macbook Pros or the Lenovo 530. The former is very tempting right now, but the latter would allow me to replace my desktop as well since it can drive four external monitors.

    If you could spec out your machine when starting a new job tomorrow, what would you want?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • This is Big Data

    I’m sure some people have bigger data, but Facebook has some serious daily growth. The highlight? 500TB a day.

    A day.

    That’s serious data. I’ve never had a database that was a TB, must less growth by over a TB a day.

    To be fair, lots of the Facebook data is unstructured, stored in Hadoop or NoSQL structures for images/video, but there’s a ton of database-like status updates, links, comments, etc. that have to be managed.

    Rather impressive, but not something I want to administer.