Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Personal Investments

    I’ve written a lot on various aspects of your career, and I mention training often. I try to encourage you to seek training dollars from your employer to go to things like the PASS Summit or SQL Connections.  I think that your boss out to invest in you and that it will pay him or her back over time with better quality work overall.

    I know there are plenty of managers that don’t have a budget for training, or they are resistant to just spend it on requests from employees without some sort of guarantee. There are no guarantees in life, and managers should get used to that, but you can help them gain some confidence that money spent on you is not money wasted.

    There are a couple ways to do this, one of which is to make your own investment. I think that you ought to be spending some time on building your skills on your own. Document those efforts, and then show your manager that you are trying to learn more when you ask for money. So for this Friday’s poll, I wanted to see who might be doing that. This week I’m asking:

    What are the investments that you are making in your career?

    Right now, what tangible things can you list that you have done in the last year that show you are making an effort to improve in your job. I realize that some of you might not want to post directly, or too specifically, but if you can write something, perhaps you can inspire others.

    For my own career, which is only somewhat technical, I’ve been making an effort to improve my skills by working more with the new aspects of SQL Server, blogging about them, and then building additional presentations that I can give at events. That is a way that I’m looking to improve my own skills, as well as gain additional exposure for my company. Hopefully that pays them back and it means it’s worth investing in me by sending me to more events, or even a few training classes.

    Hopefully you’ve done something in the last year that shows an investment in your own career. My own investment has been mostly limited to time, but I have purchased a few books to help me learn. Let us know this Friday what you’ve done on your own. And be sure to let your boss know as well.

    Steve Jones

  • Beyond Automation

    Are there some processes in an organization that are beyond automation? In this blog, the author talks about how some processes might be so embedded, or so complex that you could not automate, or change them. I think that example gets a little off track as it examines left hand driving v right hand driving, but it’s still something to consider.

    In my experience, there are many ways to use automation to assist people with work, and reduce the load needed, but ultimately we always need a human in the loop. Someone should be available to check that the calculation or the change in process is the correct one. Someone also has to be able deviate from what seems to be the rule for some process and override it.

    I’ve seen this in the past in a few places. Once where I worked with a chef trying to automate his ordering process. He was sure that he could input recipes, make guesses about usage, and then inventory constantly, adjusting his predictions and a well designed inventory system would calculate purchase orders for him. I don’t know if his predictions were poor, or if the logic wasn’t correct, but he didn’t ever seem to have as good a hand on his inventory as he needed. I used that as a basis for a liquor inventory system when I was bartending, but took the “recommendations” from the system and adjusted them based on intuition. That seemed to work out much better.

    Real life if messy, and often I think we try to simplify it so much with our models that we don’t build a system that really works well. I’m of the opinion that technology is here to assist us, not do the work for us, and we need to keep that in mind as we design software. Allow for the experienced professional to override things and use their experience to make the final decision.

    Steve Jones

  • SQL Source Control Webinar

    We had our first public SQL Source Control webinar, on the new product from Red Gate Software, my employer. I MC’d a private one a month or so ago, and sat in on one at SQL Saturday #28, but this was the first public one.

    I think it went well, a minor demo crash, but overall it worked well. However with 150+ attendees the questions came fast and furious. Some dups, but mostly good questions and we ran long trying to answer.

    I couldn’t comment on a lot of them, but we have the transcript, I have sent it to Red Gate, and have them working on answers. Can’t guarantee it will be done tomorrow, but by next week I’ll have answer out.

    If you believe in Source Control, this is a good product. It eases the burden of tracking changes, but doesn’t eliminate them, and there are holes.

    This is a process, however, and I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different, even with the product, from what I wrote about years ago: Version Control Part 1 – Dealing with Code.

  • SQL Saturday Advice – Feedback and Raffles

    At SQL Saturday #28, I was surprised to be given the speaker evaluations after my first session. One of the volunteers approached me and gave them to me, saying that I could have them and use them.

    That surprises me since I think one of the things that people rarely do is give good feedback to speakers. Too often we design these nice forms and someone just gives all 4s or 5s. They just don’t think about it much.

    I favor a simple feedback form, but I’d also include a raffle prize or two that can incent people to turn them in. I know it’s a pain to sort them out by speaker, but I think a simple session name/title, a ranking (1-3 or 1-5) and a comment would be nice.

    Then draw some at the end of the day and give prizes. I suspect we’ll get more, though not necessarily better, feedback.