Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • I lied, now what?

    Not the best policy on the job.

    You have a job and realize that you’re in over your head. Perhaps you misled a manager that couldn’t really evaluate your technical skills, or maybe you memorized enough answers from Books Online to get through in interview. It could be that you took a test during the interview and used your cell phone to post the questions on SQLServerCentral and someone gave you the answers.

    Now you have been given a project and you don’t have the skills to complete it. You can’t ask for training or consulting help since you should know this stuff.  What do you do now? Should you continue to deceive your boss and ask for free help on the Internet? Can you muddle through it and hope that you don’t do anything that causes damage to the company?

    It’s a tough spot. I realize that you have bills, obligations, perhaps a family to take care of. Losing your job could impact other peoples’ lives. However my advice would be to be honest with your boss. Let him or her know that you need help, and move forward from this point.

    No matter what your skill level, you should be making an effort to grow your skills. You should be taking advantage of any help given to you by others to learn more.  If you are making an effort, learning to close the gap between your skills and your claims of knowledge, you should be fine. Your boss will be more understanding of you asking for help than he will be if your efforts fail and your deceit is uncovered.  Most people are willing to give others second chances, especially when they are working to make amends.

    If you’re just coasting, and happy to ask others to write your queries and not improving yourself, then good luck. At some point you will be exposed, and likely fired. And you would deserve it.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72367/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Rolling to SQL Saturday #60

    I’m still stunned as I see numbers above 50 in the hash tags for SQL Saturdays. Yet here we are, #60 in Cleveland this weekend and I’m on the road this morning. Or in the air, catching a flight to Cleveland from Denver.

    I’ve never really been to Ohio, only having driven through the state on my way to someplace else. Stopping for gas and coffee doesn’t count as a visit, so I’m looking forward to this. Allen White, a friend I’ve known for years, will be my host, along with a number of other SQL people I’m looking forward to seeing again, or meeting for the first time.

    The event is sold out, which is a good thing. It shows interest in the free training and I hope this means that a few of you will help out and get another SQL Saturday in Cleveland sometime in the fall.

    I don’t have any great plans of things to see, other than run with Allen on Sunday morning. If any SQL runners are out there, feel free to join us, and follow the #sqlsat60 tag on Twitter. I’ll post some info about where/when as I get it.

  • SQL Saturday Advice–Upload Decks Early

    One of the neat features for the SQL Saturday site is that it allows the speakers to upload a deck that is attached to their session. If you go to the schedule after the event, and pick a session you attended, you can get the Powerpoint deck, the code, anything the speaker has uploaded. That’s handy, and too often I’ve been at events where speakers point you to some location they use and it’s easy to forget where this is, or where the information is stored.

    However the organizers have to send this note to speakers, and in most events, this has come after the event. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ve been busy and have forgotten to upload the deck, or I’ve been slow to do so. However Saturday night, Sunday, or early the next week is when the attendees are thinking about the event, and if the deck isn’t there, they might not go back.

    This week I got the link early for SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. I was changing a couple slides in the presentation, based on feedback from previous events, and was a day late in uploading, but I have finished, and my deck is uploaded. Now I don’t have to worry about it, and the link is live, people can get the deck for themselves.

    I know some speakers are working on their decks at the last minute. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I understand people have busy lives and they might be trying to add something on Friday that they learned recently. Or they remember to correct something from the last session as they’re reviewing the night before. That’s OK, and the organizers can always replace the code with a new download.

    I do think, however, that most attendees would appreciate having the downloads available right away, and by sending the upload link to speakers before the event, you can improve the chances you’ll have all the downloads uploaded and ready.

  • Cloud Hacking

    Hackers are training for the cloud challenges

    Not everyone is down on the cloud. Apparently someone found a great use for pay-as-you-go computing in the cloud by using it to hack wireless networks. What’s next, someone using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find security holes in police patrols of local businesses? It constantly amazes me just how someone will take a technology that is very handy and turn it into a tool used for criminal purposes. I suppose we just have to live with this use of technology and learn to protect ourselves as much as possible.

    I think that security will be one of the bigger impediments to cloud adoption than anything else. Sure there’s the cost factor of data transfers, and trying to determine how to manage the costs of large bursts. There’s the need to integrate local and cloud development codebases, and potential patching/version issues. However those are not large issues when compared with the potential security issues that come with cloud computing.

    Even as we move to private cloud structures, we may have security issues with more resources being grouped under one large services umbrella and the difficulties of managing security for large numbers of users. We want to use groups to make management easier, but the more people you manage and the more groups that become involved, the more likely it is that you will have some security hole in your system.

    I think we’ll start to find more hackers that will discover, and take advantage of, hole in cloud security that we haven’t thought of. As they do, we’ll see more resistance from companies in migrating their infrastructures. At least until it becomes more cost effective to do so. Then we’ll discover that many of those security issues don’t seem to matter quite as much.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72385/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts