Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 14 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to offer to help someone who is facing difficulties now.

    I’ve been very lucky in life. I find that success often has me associating with people who also have lots of success. Not always, but often.

    Recently I had someone reach out to me, asking if I remembered another person from the past. I did and found out this person was getting laid off and was looking for a job. I told my friend to have them reach out to me, with permission to pass along my contact stuff.

    I then offered to do some introductions with others, and see if there were potential opportunities. I sent a few messages, and I’m hoping one of them works out.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #157–The End of Year

    tsqltuesdayIt’s that time of the month, and I’m late. I’ve been on holiday for a week, so this is a quick post for T-SQL Tuesday. This month is hosted by Garry Bargsley, and is a fitting topic for the last month of the year.

    Garry asks about end of the year data activities. Most of his examples are administrative, but I’m sure there might be some dev activities as well. I’ve got a few thoughts on each, some of which I’ve done, some of which I wish I’d have done in the past, but recommend now.

    T-SQL Tuesday is a great place to participate in the community and a great way to show your knowledge and skills off as well for potential employees. Write your own posts on a blog, or somewhere like LinkedIn, Medium, or another site. If you want to host, ping me @way0utwest or sjones at sqlservercentral dot com.

    End of Year Administration

    When I’ve been in the Operations side of data, there aren’t a lot of things I do at the end of the year, but I do find the downtime useful for some maintenance and cleanup. Usually we are doing well reactive stuff as business slows down, so I spend time on things that I’ve wanted to do all year, but haven’t had time to tackle.

    The things I try to do:

    • Index cleanup – look for dups, unused, etc.
    • archive/delete data or tables – I try to clean data where possible. Less always makes things faster
    • Chronic issues – Think about how I can solve something and prevent future problems
    • Space planning – look over trends and be sure we’re ready for next year.
    • Security – remove old accounts (or disable) as much as possible.

    End of Year Development

    Development tasks tend to be more tightly specified, and there often isn’t a good end of year list. However, similar to administration, one thing I have tried to do when times are slow is tackle things I’d want to change, but never have time. End of year is like this, as are some times after deployments.

    Apart from code I might want to refactor or change, the big things I might look at during the end of year are:

    • Branch cleanup – easy to have some of these hanging around.
    • Pipelines – Use time to improve these, or ensure that they are noisy. Either change something, reduce tests, or try to avoid any unnecessary things causing the pipeline to go red.
    • Learning – covered below.

    Bonus – End of Year Career

    This isn’t specifically for SQL Server, but it could be. This is a good time of year to stop and try to assess how things went. It’s also good to look forward, and use slower times to make the future better. A few recommendations:

    • Always have a list of things to read/learn/practice. Use slow times to work on something. If nothing else, tackle the Advent of Code.
    • Assess your career – is this the place for you? The job, the employer, the field? Think about what things excite you and what don’t, what make days drag, or go by quickly.
    • Plan for the future – Make a few career goals. I’ve done this for a few years, and it helps me continue to learn and grow.

  • Daily Coping 13 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to contact someone you can’t be with to see how they are.

    Maybe the one thing the pandemic did for me is make me think about other people more. More people and more often.

    I’ve been randomly contacting people for a few years. Often people I’d expect to see at some point during the year, but knowing I wouldn’t. It’s been good to chat and share a few messages.

    A couple weeks ago I found some old pictures from the past of various people. I sent them over in a message to say hi, remember a time we were together and check in on how they were doing. It was a fun few minutes out of my day.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • The Time Thieves

    Time is the most valuable asset I have most days. Time is often a limiting factor that dictates my priorities at work. It also often determines my stress and enjoyment levels in life. Using time effectively can lower the former and increase the latter.

    A few years ago I read Making Work Visible, which talks about work flow and how time can be wasted in teams. The book covers the 5 types of time thieves, and it helped me to better think about how I organize both my tasks at work and in my personal life. I think that has sometimes helped me find a way to get more done with less effort, and less stress.

    There’s an article from the author that summarizes the time thieves, talking about how to avoid losing time in a busy world. For me, I find that the WIP thief and the Unplanned Work are often the biggest thieves in my life. Usually when I haven’t done a good job of prioritizing and pushing back on low-priority items. Often, however, the person I’m pushing back on is me, so I’ve got to learn how to better manage myself.

    Often the way to avoid many of these issues at work is with better visibility and communication. These are two things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit after the recent PASS Data Community Summit. While I didn’t have much to do with the event, I did speak, and I took on some extra speaking duties when others were overloaded. I could certainly see some time thieves at work in the run-up to the event during the last few weeks. Things to try and fix before next year.

    We all need good technical skills, often strong ones when our organizations are trying to build, manage, and operate complex environments. However, there are other skills that can be just as important. Working in a team, coordinating work, being clear, and being transparent are all skills that can help us succeed without burnout. They are also key to finding these five time thieves and ensuring we get more done without requiring more resources.

    I still don’t quite know how to manage my work and personal lives together, but I am working on getting better at working in a group, which is something I find myself doing more and more.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.