I’m off on vacation this week, enjoying Athens with my wife. I’ll be unlikely to respond to communications during this time.
Have a great week and I’ll be back after Christmas.
Author: way0utwest
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Making Choices
I wrote about shutting down some travel for the foreseeable future. Its been a long couple of years for me. If you look at my speaking schedule, I’ve presented at an average of 20+ events for the last few years. This year was a few less, but I’ve had more travel outside of that. By the end of the year, I’ll have spent 9 weeks outside of the US. While some of that is vacation, it’s a lot of time away from home. In addition to the events, I’ve had other travel for work that doesn’t appear there, as well as some vacation time for volleyball (my daughter competes) and family time.
Lately I’ve been seeing all the tweets and posts about SQL Bits 2018. I won’t be going, which is sad for me. I love the event, it’s my favorite and my wife would love to go with me sometime, maybe in 2018. As I see speakers submitting and the excitement building, it feels like I should just send in a session, but I realize I need to stick with my decision.
Making choices is hard. For a couple years I’ve been saying I need to travel a bit less, but I haven’t done a good job of slowing down my travel. I find that I’ve done that with other work demands in the past (and personal ones), and I see plenty of other people doing the same thing. This fall I made the commitment that I’d limit travel next year, and I talked to my manager as well. We agreed on a plan, and she’s holding me to the plan, even when I get a bit excited about new events.
My current job allows me some flexibility in how I work, but in past jobs I’ve had similar ways that I could change my job, if I made the effort do so. Your employer will ask a lot of you, and often keep asking. I’ve certainly had some bosses that were unreasonable and demanded too much, but most were willing to work with me. It took me a number of years to learn to push back and say no, as well as learn to make choices among different situations. I find if I don’t make choices, I’ll tend to over commit and under deliver, while being disappointed in myself that I couldn’t make it all work. Or I become a little burned out, spending too much time trying to keep all the balls in the air and running myself ragged.
Balance is important, not only between work and life, but also within work. I find that the more I make choices and stick with them, the better adjusted I am in all of my life. I’m a little sad that I won’t speak at as many events next year, but I’ll pick and choose a few, and hopefully get some things done at work that I’ve been putting off. I’m also hoping that life will seem less chaotic and busy in general, with a little more time to relax and smell the sawdust.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcast
Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.
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AutoMap in SQL Compare
SQL Compare is a core product from Redgate and I’ve got a series on some of the interesting things I’ve found. Download a trial today if you haven’t tried it.
SQL Compare does a great job of trying to help you map columns in your database. For example, I was testing deployments recently to see how a process might work and I noticed the SQL Compare had automapped columns for me.
This is a feature in SQL Compare that tries to make your development effort a little quicker and easier. As you can see in the image below, there’s a note at the top of the comparison, and then an indicator for the actual object.
If I click the object, I see the code, but I don’t know where the auto mapping has taken place.
In this case, I know because I changed the Quantity column name, but there’s nothing special here about the mapping. SQL Compare just mapped “Quantity” to “Qty” by itself. If I check the project properties, I can see the mapping, and change it if necessary.
If you want to know how to customize this, I’ve got an article on the Redgate Hub on How to Customize Schema Comparisons using Auto Map in SQL Compare.
Automap is one of those useful, handy features of SQL Compare. It gets you moving in development quickly by taking care of some work, but you can easily change things and keep your project handy if you have the need.
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It’s Time for SQL in the City
Today is SQL in the City 2017. Once again we’re streaming the event online, live from Cambridge in the UK. I’ve flown over, along with Grant Fritchey and Kathi Kellenberger to entertain you for the day. We’ll be broadcasting at 11am in the UK for five hours before we take a short break and return for a 1pm EST start of the second broadcast. You can still register and we hope you’ll tune in for a few a session or two, or all of them if you can convince the boss to give you a training day. You won’t know unless you ask.
I’m excited to show off a few things today, as I’m sure Kathi and Grant are as well. Our developers have been hard at work throughout the year, improving our software and adding new features, while fixing a few bugs. It feels like the pace of change is steadying out, with most products releasing changes every two weeks, but we’re adding a lot more exciting and interesting changes. It seems that the products are maturing well, in ways that I didn’t expect.
I’ve been especially excited by the changes in SQL Clone this year. We’ve really grown this product up, with the team being reponsive to customer requests. It’s exciting to be the one to present some of the changes to you, as well as try to introduce others to the product. This is one of those products that I wish would have been available 15 years ago as I would have saved lots of storage costs as well as gained a tremendous amount of flexibility.
SQL Prompt and SQL Monitor have also had great years, and I’ve been impressed with their growth. Unfortunately I didn’t get the short straw and had to leave those products to my colleagues. I guess I can’t have all the fun. Maybe I’ll try to photobomb my way into one of those sessions.
Presenting at events is exciting, and I’m looking forward to the day. It’s long, but it will still be a fun time. These streaming events are also a neat experience, as we’ve got a bit of a TV studio feel, with multiple cameras, displays, tape on the floor, and more. For someone that is used to sitting at a desk and working at my pace, I get a little excited by the efforts put into the broadcast from our IT staff. We have various schedules and checklists, and I’ve spent the last couple days rehearsing the talks.
I still like live events, and hope we’ll do a few in the future, but for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy SQL in the City from the comfort of your office.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcast
Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.
