Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Building a Professional Development Plan

    Your personal business plan.

    If you are waiting on your boss to tell you what to learn or what to do, you are making a mistake, they arent going to do it.

    Would tou do an it project without writing anything down? Usually not, so why not do this for your care ultimately you need to take charge of your own career

    Tis is more than technology ( networking, project management, managing, accounting, etc)

    Has goals, milestones and tasks. Its written down. Loos at your total package.

    Consider yourself a product.

    Where you you want to be a year from now? Are you still excited about your career?

    Time
    0-20 hours just work
    21-50 slow growth, maintenance
    51-100 growth, one skill
    101-200 growth, multiple skills, change focus
    200+ hyper growth

    Money
    $250 basic
    $1000 growth
    $2500 leap frog
    $5000 everyone envies you

    Hard to write the check. Most people spend 0 if the employer doesn’t contribute

    Beak up the time. Easy to take one class for the year, but that is all the time and money. Thi about the divisions. Both time and money. You have resource constraints, but think about the way you do this and live with the constraints or renegotiate the resource with yourself/your family

    How do you learn best? Is it books, video, blog/article, seminars, hands on? Usually you will combine this together into some plan.

    Why write? One of the main reasons is that people think they don’t have time, they don’t know what to write about, worried about embarrassing themselves.

    If you write in a word document and saved it without showing anyone you are ahead of the game, you are helping yourself, teaching yourself, and building a better skill.

    Treat your manager like a client. Imagine that your job is a one year contract and you need to win the bid for the next year. You want to win the bid, so you want to edge out others. Can you get the business by staying where you are? That is the mindset to develop a plan.

    Change your mindset in building the plan. Consider yourself a business of one and approach your career with the attitude of taking control of your own career.

  • A 22 Hour Layover

    I joked about having a 22 hour layover in Denver yesterday and a few people were wondering what airline screwed me this time. That made me laugh, because they didn’t get the joke.

    I got home yesterday at 3:30pm from SQL Server Connections in Orlando. I’ve been there all week, and after some travel delays, I got back at in time to pick up my son at 3:45 from his school bus.

    Today at 1:15 or so I need to leave the house, heading back to the airport for my trip to Dallas and SQL Saturday #63 tonight. Essentially I got a 22 hour layover at home before my next trip.

    I hate that, and as much as I’m looking forward to seeing people in Dallas, the travel wears on me. Fortunately I’ll be shutting things down until June when I got to Pensacola and SQL Saturday #77. That won’t be a bad trip as my daughter will come and we’ll spend a few days at the beach and make it a nice Daddy/daughter vacation.

  • Improving SQLServerCentral

    A better database for SQLServerCentral: BigTable

    We have some big changes coming to SQLServerCentral over the next few months. In response to a large number of comments about the performance of the site, we are looking to implement some sweeping changes that will drastically improve performance, and make the site much more interesting.

    We send out nearly a million newsletters a day, which places a substantial load on our system. Our hardware upgrade last year improved the performance, but as we continue to grow, we are stressing the hardware. When we add in the global reach of our forums, we have once again begun to noticed a slowdown on the systems.

    Fortunately we have a solution. One of the distinguished engineers at Red Gate has a brother that works for Google and they have agreed to help us out. We received a license to implement the BigTable technology at SQLServerCentral and will be moving our primary database systems to this NoSQL storage. This will allow us to scale out effectively with a large number of small, single socket, dual core servers, each of which will handle a portion of our load.

    In addition we have decided to also scale out our articles using the cloud. With a combination of the BigTable technology and GoogleDocs, we will be moving all our publications to the cloud, enabling you to get access to our content with the power of the Google network. We will have analytics built in and the OpenID framework will authenticate you with a Google ID.

    Of course, this is all a big joke give that today is April Fools day in the US. We like Google’s technology, but we *love* SQL Server and have no desire to move off that platform for any other. Now if we could get Resource Governor in our Standard Edition, all would be great.

    Enjoy your day and hopefully you liked this editorial.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Hanging with an Inspiration

    A long, long time ago, in a state far away, I started writing about technology. At the time, in the late 90s, I was looking to share some of my knowledge, and hopefully advance my career along.

    It was intimidating to think that I could produce articles anywhere near the quality of the books I was reading to learn more about SQL, and I needed some advice. I looked at the covers of a few of the titles on my bookshelf, back when I used to collect physical books, and reached out to one of the very well known authors.

    I asked a few questions about being a writer, asked for tips, and asked about how feasible it was to make a living at writing. Needless to say I was surprised when the author of about 10 books at the time responded with some candid advice and information about the publishing side of technology. I got some advice, some realistic warnings about what to expect, and most importantly, some encouragement.

    The author was Mark Minasi, a fellow Virginia Beach resident. Well, fellow at the time. He’s still there, but I’ve moved to Denver

    Over the years I have seen Mark a couple of times at conferences and shaken his hand. Paul Randal is a mutual friend and has introduced us, though it’s always been a “nice to meet you, big fan” from me since one of us is usually walking away to some other commitment.

    However last night I had the chance to sit and talk with Mark over a few drinks. It was the first time I could properly thank him for his advice and encouragement over a decade ago. We shared a few drinks, some laughs, and I got to hang with someone I admired. I got a few complements back about what I had achieved and it was one of the highlights of my trip.