Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Finding Motivation to Learn

    Monica Rathbun wrote a piece on investing in yourself, which I think is a good way to think about spending time and resources on learning. Every time that you spend some brain power on building or improving your skills, you are investing in your career, and giving yourself another way to drive your career in the direction you want to move.

    There are no shortage of excuses that Monica lists, and I’ve heard most of them. These are certainly hardships for your career, but these are things that many other people face, both in this industry and others. While these could be a short term reason to just grind out work, none is not a good long term excuse. I can accept you not progressing for a few quarters, but I’d hope you learned something new and helpful to put on your resume or CV every year.

    Doctors are constantly reading and learning to keep up in their careers. Lawyers and CPAs often give up weekends on their own to continue learning. Even mechanics, carpenters, electricians, and more are often working through continuing education. Some of it provided or funded by their jobs, some not, but plenty of it takes place outside of work hours. It’s just accepted that growing with your career is the norm.

    Most IT people expect they need to keep learning, but I find so many people are unmotivated to do anything their boss won’t provide, whether that’s time or funds. That’s a mistake, in my opinion, as you are one unexpected event from scrambling to find a new job. Plenty of people in that situation find themselves taking a pay cut, getting a longer commute, or finding more stress in their new position.

    Continued learning won’t necessarily prevent that, but it does increase the chance that you’ll be a more attractive candidate and perhaps have you pick of positions rather than settling for just some job you don’t want. The more you know, the more you can show, the more you document with a project, a blog, or elsewhere, the more likely someone is to want to hire you. Hopefully that means you find opportunities that suit you, rather than are just available.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Looking Back at the Decade

    I started a thread on Twitter,looking back at the decade in pictures. I had a hashtag (#decadeofmemories), but there are lots of those. If you’re interested, flip through my feed from this tweet back.

  • Looking Back at the Decade

    Today is the last day of 2019, and the last day of the 2010 decade. I’m still somewhat amazed by the fact that we’re entering the 2020s and we still don’t really have flying cars. We’re well past 2001 and 2010, and still not much space exploration, though the growth in computing power and AI/ML likely accounts for the success of rockets that can take off and land and be used again. I’m still impressed by SpaceX. I’m also thrilled that I got to see the first rocket that landed successfully. Actually, we didn’t see much more than a flare light up and then go out, but my son and I were at Cape Canaveral, watching from the causeway on that historic night.

    In the last decade, we’ve seen a number of SQL Server releases. 2008 R2 was released in 2010, and since then we’ve had 5 other releases. Back in 2010, we didn’t have Availability Groups. We had clustering, Database Mirroring, and Log Shipping for HA/DR. We had no in-memory capabilities or columnstore indexes, things we assume are available now, even though not many of us use them. Maybe more surprising, the idea of SQL Server on Linux was still my most popular joke for most of this decade.

    Data became very important this decade, perhaps most notably with the passage of the GDPR in the EU. Whether you think this is a good law or not, it has changed how we view data. No longer is data something that organizations own and humans have no rights against it. I think it’s a good start, and lots of other regions are basing laws on the GDPR. We could do better, and ask for more control, responsibility, and accountability over data, but this is a good start.

    I also think that many people have started to become more data savvy and competent in how they work with database systems. While we see lots of basic and silly questions at SQLServerCentral, I see less of the completely ignorant questions being posted and more often I see complex requirements that are hard to handle in SQL.

    We’ve seen quite a rise in NoSQL database platforms. Neo4J was released in 2007 and MongoDB in 2009, but both have had a lot of growth in the last ten years. We’ve seen Apache Spark and Databricks appear and become integrated with SQL Server, which isn’t something I’d have thought about in 2010. Similarly, the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Lake are extremely recent. Windows Azure itself was actually released in Feb 2010. Now, it’s a collection of over 600 services that many of you use everyday. AWS has had similar growth to the point where I think many of us do think cloud first for many systems these days.

    SQLServerCentral was in v3 of it’s existence back then. The original ASP site had been rewritten in ASP.NET and then nHibernate when Redgate Software purchased the site. Since then we’ve continued to grow and thrive, adding our popular Stairway Series and continuing to help you learn and solve problems every day.

    T-SQL Tuesday was just getting going, in its first year. We’ve now had 10 years of the blog party happening every month. After a long run, Adam Machanic moved on in life and I now manage the event from tsqltuesday.com. If you haven’t ever participated, it’s a good way to get started with a blog and building a brand for your career.

    Quit a bit has happened since 2010. Data growth is astounding, and continues to increase. Exabytes were surprising back then, but today we talk in terms of ZB, another order of magnitude. I think that provides lots of challenges and opportunities for us to grow as data professionals in the next decade. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are as well.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Some Numbers in 2019

    It’s the end of 2019, and I thought I’d look back at some data from this year. It’s been a busy, but wonderful year for me. I like numbers, so here are some stats from this year. They’re somewhat random, but interesting to me.

    Work

    • 181 podcasts
    • 61 flights on United
    • 139,000 miles flown
    • 12 International business class upgrades (makes a big difference going to work)
    • 5 countries visited (outside the US, 3 new ones for me)
    • 68 nights in Hilton hotels, 23 in AirBnBs, 3 in another hotel
    • 600+ pieces of content (articles, editorials, questions of the day, and blogs) published on SSC
    • 12 webinars
    • 8 SQL Saturdays attended (Memphis, Melbourne, Brisbane, Christchurch, Slovenia new ones for me)
    • 9 SQL in the City Summits (a high and none missed), along with 2 Streamed events

    Personal

    • 2 days snowboarding (a low in the last decade)
    • 1 Horse shelter built, 1 generator shed built
    • 1 year head coaching volleyball
    • Final 8 tournaments attended for my daughter’s club volleyball career.
    • 2 camping trips with horses (rode on one)
    • Read 125 books (all time high)
    • 4 comedy shows attended (finally, no kids!)
    • 230 workout days this year, a little low

    There are probably lots more things I could track, but these are the big ones for me, and certainly these help me think about next year. I want to ski more, build more things, and workout more. Not sure I’ll read more, but I spent the year re-reading some series and some of those went quickly.

    All in all, 2019 was great for me. Looking forward to seeing where 2020 takes me.