I read that and immediately went back to a time earlier in my career. I worked in a large team of IT workers, with a variety of skills and experiences. Each of us had an area we specialized in (databases for me), but we had to cross train and handle calls and issues in other areas at times. Being a diverse team of about 20 people, we all had noticeable strengths and weaknesses. Some people were talented in almost all areas and could figure things out. Some struggled and sought out the experts in areas outside their own constantly.
We had one person in particular that was fairly low down on the skill level, and was in charge of a number of administrative-type tasks for the IT infrastructure. Things like basic group/user security, handling simpler AD tasks, things that you usually task to a junior level individual. I often heard others complaining that this person could not carry their own weight, or didn’t do enough work.
However when this person went on vacation, and someone else had to fill in, I’d hear more complaints about having to do basic tasks, like managing groups or setting permissions. I couldn’t imagine the way a team would work if it was filled with highly talented, highly capable superstars; we’d never get any work done because of the constant complaining.
We all have a role to fill at times in our lives. Sometimes it’s a high level role, and at times it’s a low level role. Each of us brings value for the work we do, and none of us is any “better” at life than any other. The lead developer might seem like they are more important than the secretary or the cleaning crew, but those other contributions are important as well. They’re valuable, and they should be appreciated.
I was honored to be asked to do the keynote for SQL Saturday #28 in Baton Rouge recently. It’s taken me longer than expected to process this and upload it, but here is my keynote speech from a couple weeks ago:
Part 1: The first 14 minutes or so with some introductory comments.
I shot this with my Flip camera on a stand near the stage since there wasn’t a good place to put it. A large auditorium and I wandered out of sight quite a bit. I realize that I also need a better way to grab audio for various events like this, so I’m looking at a separate audio mic and recorder.
I’m late, I suck, but here’s some things I started in Baton Rouge and am just now getting out.
First, I’ll add my slides to the SQL Saturday site soon. I did two presentations and the keynote, which I posted yesterday. However I know a few people want to see them, so I’ve added them up on SQL Saturday to a static page I built.
I have to say that Patrick LeBlanc’s enthusiasm is infectious. There is a whole team of people in the local area that I was thrilled to see again and impressed with the level of effort they put into making the event run smoothly. They’re always happy, very welcoming with Southern hospitality, and they make the event a lot of fun for everyone involved, especially those of us that come from out of town.
I grabbed a little video and some images, adding in a little narration. Nothing special, but some memories for me:
This was an impressive lineup of speakers. Not to take away from the local speakers, who did a great job, but I believe Patrick had 14 MVPs, many from out of town like me, that came to the event. The speaker’s dinner was great, with about 50 people there, which is huge. Many I’ve attended had about 12 people. Patrick even personalized shirts for us. I don’t wear many of my SQL Saturday shirts, but I’ll wear this one.
The event ran very smoothly. The group gets the use of a building a LSU, which is a beautiful place. They had two hallways, with food and sponsors in between them. As much as many people don’t want to see vendors, those people and their money is the reason the event runs. Remember that the next time you don’t want to hear about a product or pass a table.
I had one of four early morning sessions that gave people something to do if they arrive early, and helps beginners get some basic knowledge. I’d like to see this at more events. Then I gave the keynote, which can be a challenge at many places. About 250-300 people were there, I hurried a bit, but I think it went well.
Then it was a full day, 8 or 9 tracks, of sessions. There was even a great .NET track run by a guy basically giving a full day of .NET basics to people. I loved that!
Lunch went smooth, with some optional vendor presentations (see three paras above), but they were sparsely attended. Lots of people sitting around instead, which is fine. I think lunch is a good decompression time.
After lunch, more sessions, and I walked between a few, trying to get some clips of different people, checking out some speakers that I, surprisingly, hadn’t seen before. I popped in to watch Sean McCown, Tim Costello, Denny Cherry, Wes Brown, and a few more. I made it a point to watch a few people talk.
The hallways were mostly dead during sessions, a nice sign. People were coming for training. I shook a lot of hands, and had a lot of 3 minute conversations with students that attended various colleges, even some out of state. They were looking for some basic training. I met local people coming to get some knowledge that the boss wouldn’t pay for, and even a guy that had driven 3 hours from M-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-pee-pee-eye for training since his employer didn’t pay for much. I queried everyone if they thought it was worth it, and got all positive responses.
A long day, especially for me since I started at 6:30 and left around 5:15. I went for a run on lovely University Lake before going to the after party (after showering). It was mostly for volunteers and speakers, but I had fun chatting with people until around 10 when I left to get dinner.
All the SQL Saturdays are good events. I haven’t seen a bad one, and they have tended to run fairly smoothly. The only things I noticed here were a lack of water (we ran out in the afternoon, but had lots of Orange soda) and the raffle at the end was hard to hear Patrick. For the latter, I told him they should be up on the stairs, not at the bottom. For the water, I know there’s a lot in the air, but more would be nice, especially since I try to promote being healthy. Patrick had fun as there were tweets asking us to drink Orange Soda and then he raffled off a case at the end.
The enthusiasm and fun that that the volunteers have, the jokes they make, and even the tweets coming out make this the most fun of all the events I’ve been to.
The DBA job is somewhat nebulous, with a variety of skills being needed, and the mix of those skills varying from company to company. As companies look to save money, and look to perhaps go with cloud computing or other types of hosted environments, are DBAs going to need to also perform financial calculations?
I was reading a post on SQL Azure recently that talked about the cost of indexes. Not performance, or space, but actual real dollars and cents cost since indexes take up space and you are charged by the space you use. Adding extra indexes, or adding columns to indexes, or adding covering columns, can cost you real money if you have any large scale of resources.
So does that mean that in addition to trying to determine what changes you can make to code to improve performance, or what new features might make sense to your applications, you need to also run some financial ROI calculation on the choices? Maybe PowerPivot was released just in time for all those virtual systems that might charge by the byte or cycle.
As a DBA, I’ve had to budget, and try to determine how to spend funds for hardware, balancing out choices for RAM v disk v CPU, and even comparing secondary servers for read-only scale out against a larger single server. However I typically don’t have to compare the cost of features in my analysis.
I’ve sometimes wished I could pay for just one feature, and it’s starting to look like that might be something that could happen in the cloud. While the possibility if mix and match features intrigues me, the extra work to add cost to my calculations along with performance makes me think the cloud might be more trouble than it’s worth.
“Never underestimate what you can bring to the table.” – Rob Cooper, on StackOverflow.
