Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • It’s Your Career

    It’s your career. It’s something you have to take ownership of and work on. I know that life is busy, and training budgets are tight. That’s one reason we started SQL Saturday; it’s a way to bring a training event and a conference experience to many people.

    fun2

    I posted this tweet almost a year ago, seeing Brent in a class somewhere, learning and taking notes during some session. It was in humor, but I’m a little serious here. We all have more to learn, and while you don’t need to cram it all in this year, you should be taking advantage of your user group, local events, conferences, classes, even reading something in a newsletter on a regular basis.

    Many of us are out here to help. I’ve spoken at 12 events this year, 10 of them free, and will be at another free event this week (SQL in the City – LA). However, you’ve got to make the effort to improve yourself. I , and many others, will try to help you, teach you, but you’ve got to do some work yourself.

    Pace yourself, learn at a reasonable rate given the other responsibilities in your life, but don’t ignore this aspect of your career.

    PS – If you’re in the LA area, there’s still time to register for SQL in the City and get a free day of training. I’ll also be at DevConnections next week and SQLInspire the week after that.

  • The Cost of Architecture

    Falling Water is an amazing architectural wonder.

    I saw a note recently about the cost of decisions in programming made over time (thanks to BrentOzar, PLF). It’s an interesting look back at what decisions might have ended up costing computing a tremendous amount of pain and problems over time. It’s a nice read, especially if you remember something about the history of computing and how technology has evolved over the last forty or so years.

    Making decisions and choices early on in the development of a system is hard work. There’s a reason why architects are paid well, and sometimes seem slow to decide how to proceed. The high pay, however, is a reason why so many people crave the architect title, and even find reasons why they should get it, even when under qualified. Unfortunately we have no good guidelines on how to decide what titles someone should have, or they have earned.

    A great developer, a great architect, is often worth much more productive than an average one. Not only while building a system, but also in the future as the system is used, evolves, and is improved by others. Making good choices early on can result in much better software over time, as the ways in which software is improved are often based on the way it was originally built. Future developers try to continue to add to the project, or are constrained, by the early decisions made about the architecture.

    Hindsight always gives you a better view of a decision than you have when you are making it. Even in the article the author points out that the biggest mistake he found in computing was still the best decision at the time. We will hopefully make many good decisions, but all of us will make some bad ones. Whether in specifying hardware, writing T-SQL, or some other choice, we will find over time that some of our choices were poor ones.

    The best thing we can do is learn to look back at our architecture decisions over time and evaluate whether they were good or bad. Learn from our mistakes, and learn from the mistakes others have made, trying to strive to do better in the future with the knowledge that comes from examining the past.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Which Versions of SQL Server Do You Have?

    SQL Server v6.5 retail box
    This was my 5th SQL Server version upgrade.

    I have worked with every version of SQL Server since it was first available from Microsoft on OS/2. Each version has improved the features, the stability, and the scalability, and I’ve looked forward to each change. In many of the companies I worked at, we had a fairly homogenous environment, with one or two versions to support. I think some of that was the timing of my employment dates with the version release dates. If I’d stayed longer at a few jobs, I think I might have ended up supporting three versions of SQL Server in a few places.

    That seems to have changed, however with the long delay of SQL Server 2005, and then the very short delays for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. Now it seems many companies have two or three versions at a minimum and might have 4 versions, with SQL Server 2000 servers still available. The last year on Twitter I’ve seen a number of DBAs noting that they are retiring SQL Server 2000 instances at a good clip, with a few people eliminating the version from their environments, but there are plenty of instances still out there.

    This week I wanted to see what percentage of people are still supporting older versions. There seems to be less of a push to upgrade old servers, but we still install the latest version for newer servers. Supporting more versions may mean a higher cost of support for your infrastructure, so I decided to ask this question:

    What’s the oldest version of SQL Server you still support?

    It would be good to know how many versions you are supporting, and if you have older versions (v6.5, v7, v2000), are they used in limited systems, such as keycard systems only. My intention is to try and get an understanding of the shape of the SQL Server community, and the types of work they do each day.

    As SQL Server evolves from a core database engine and includes a wide variety of subsystems and features, I think there is less of a need to upgrade existing instances en masse. Instead targeting those applications that receive large benefits from the changes seems to make more sense. With a very stable engine and very few security problems, I think that companies will use each version longer and require their DBAs to support more versions at any one time. I am sure by the middle of 2010, we will have some DBAs supporting five versions of SQL Server in their companies, going back to SQL Server 2000.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Fun Pix

    Various photo uploads from the past year.

    fun8

    fun7

    fun6

    fun5

    fun3

    fun2

    fun1