Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • I Love the SQL Community

    This community is amazing. Across two decades in my career I have seen it grow, and grow, and now explode. It’s been exciting to me, and it continues to be exciting every day.

    The community is you. Each of you out there, each person that visits a site like this, or attends a user group, a SQL Saturday, posts a blog, or even asks a question. You are the greatest part of this community. It’s the involvement of people that is the most important part of this community, and I hope that more of you will continue to actively work in the community over time.

    I don’t have to attend SQL Saturdays. It’s a pain to travel. It’s slightly annoying to my wife when I’m gone as it cuts into her horse time. My kids miss me on the weekends. It jams up my work schedule and results in some late nights for me. I don’t typically represent Red Gate, though I’ll likely do a bit more in the future as they are paying for my trips. I don’t even get a resume bullet out of it at this point in my life.

    So why do I go? I go because of this community. I go because I get to talk to people and get excited by listening to them. I get inspired to see people giving up time out of their lives to try and learn something. And I feel I should be doing more when I hear some people tell me how far they’ve driven to a SQL Saturday. I go because the it’s least I can do to give back to a community that has helped me over the years.

    The community is bigger than any site, bigger than any event, bigger than any organization. There is so much to appreciate in this community, and I look forward to finding new ways to speak to you, engage with you, interact with you, and learn from you. It is a privilege and honor to exchange emails on a regular basis with so many of you, and shake the few hands at events.

    I look forward to catching up with old friends and meeting new ones in the future. Please feel free to say hi, ask me a question, give me your opinion on anything SQL Server, or just share a cup of coffee at SQL Connections this fall, or any of the SQL Saturday events we attend together.

    Steve Jones

  • Project Phoenix

    As I’ve given my Modern Resume talk at a number of events, I’ve found that there are quite a few people out there in the technology business that are searching for work. Or searching for better work. I’ve tried to give them some advice on things that might make them more attractive for employers and more likely to find another job. One of the things that I advise them to do is volunteer. Putting forth some effort to help others with your technical skills, or even with leadership or management skills, can help fill up your resume and show employers that you are motivated.

    But how should you volunteer? I’ve suggested contacting a local non-profit or school and asking them if there is someting you can build for them that might be useful in their mission. I’m sure that there are many ideas and needs for these groups, who often can’t afford to hire a technology professional to work in a formal way.

    Arnie Rowland, longtime SQL Server MVP, has a great new project that looks to assist those people out there that have a project idea. Project Phoenix looks to provide some resources to developers, or aspiring developers, out there. With a combination of software, books,and training, Arnie has built a program that will give people and non-profits some assistance in implementing technology into their environments.

    This is a great program that looks to give back to communities and help some technology workers at the same time. If you are interested in applying, or know someone that might benefit from the help, please point them to the Project Phoenix page. You can view the people that have been awarded here.

    Steve Jones

  • NetFlix and Null

    There are some progressive companies out there, and I think they are doing some very interesting things with how they treat employees and work with them. One thing that Netflix does, and I’ve seen others do, is eliminate the tracking of vacation time. They hold people responsible for getting work done, and if you don’t do the work, you get to move on to another place of employment.

    That got me thinking after following the debate about logic, mathematics and NULL in the SQLServerCentral forums. It’s a fascinating view in how some people look at NULL in databases, and worth reading.

    I started to wonder what the proper value would be for these fields?

    • Netflix.VacationHoursAccrued
    • Netflix.VacationHoursUsed

    Would you set them to 0? Or inifinity, maybe marked by something like 99999?

    Or would you use NULL? With the idea that you don’t know, and more importantly to me, you don’t care? I think that the proper design would depend on what you plan to do with the data. It’s not being used, so my opinion is that NULL works fine, and the NULL bitmap could potentially use less space.

  • Connectify

    It’s a wired world. You’d think by this point, most major hotels, at least those costing upwards of $100/night, would have good wired, or wireless connections for their guests. I’d like it to be free, but I’d settle for good quality.
    However I hate the way that most hotels manage connectivity. It’s not by the connection, or room, but often by the MAC. So that people with one device are fine, but those of us that are techies, with more than one device, can’t connect them all. At least not cheaply.
    connectify[1]
    I usually carry two laptops, a iPhone, and sometimes my wife’s got a laptop and phone as well. I’ve debated carrying a router and using that, but it’s one more thing to carry. Instead I decided to try Connectify.
    It’s a wireless hotspot that runs on Windows 7 and allows your laptop to share it’s connection. You install it, no reboot needed, and then you create a hotspot name and password.
    That’s it.
    Once it’s up and running, in a few minutes, your other devices can connect to your personal hotspot. You have a local LAN and you can easily share files and access the Internet from all your devices.
    A very cool tool. I have it on both of my Win7 laptops to run hotspots, separate names, so whichever one is connected can be my router and allow me high speed access for all my devices on one connection.
    If my Internet connection works in the hotel.