Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Goal Progress in December 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    The last review of the year. I need to set new goals, but I’ll actually do that the first week of the year, taking a little time next week to think.

    2021 Grade: C+

    I don’t think I did OK here with the year of goals, but I learned a few things about setting goals and how to tackle them for next year. That will inform my view of the future.

    This year wasn’t supposed to be as busy. With no real end to the pandemic in sight, I thought I’d be home more often, with a little more time to work on myself, but that was a mistake. I got quite busy, and I found myself spending more time away from deep technical topics.

    Not a bad thing, but it affected my goals. As usual, reading is easier for me than working on technical problems, and that aligns with a lot of what I do for work.

    Here is where I finished in the various areas:

    Reading

    I’ve been working through a few books around the fiction that captivates me. I like the feedback book, but I find myself stopping and thinking often. It’s going slower than expected. The Project to Product was good, making me rethink how I would tackle software in a company.

    The GE one was personally interesting as I wanted to work there when I was in university. It’s almost more of a history book, but it confirms what I thought. A dysfunctional place to work that played with finance more than they were amazing business people. They were good business people, but not the star it appeared from the outside.

    The PoSh book was a bit of a project, but I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one.

    Here’s the current progress:

    Technical Skills

    Here are the items I was aiming to work on this year:

    • Certification –  AZ-900 – 0% (2 modules)
    • Certification – DP-900 – 50% (14 modules)
      • 50% of this is studying the general material
      • 20% is the focused review
      • 30% the test
    • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25 (2021 puzzles 4)
    • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25
    • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25

    Projects

    My projects were in these areas.

    • Support Local Events (or whatever the data platform one day event thing is)
      • Added 3 events manually in 2021
      • Managed to get SQL Saturday set up as an independent charity, a US 501.c.3 corp
      • 2 SQL Saturday events in 2021 (1 in-person, 1 virtual)
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
      • Spoke at 2 groups. The third hasn’t had meetings.
      • I did speak at 4 remote user groups
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
      • Semi-failure. There wasn’t much interest in either, but I did get my session to the user group to be hybrid, and some people appreciated this.
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – Didn’t complete this, but it’s working for kids and parents to see some stats.

  • Daily Coping 24 Dec 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to help others by giving away something you don’t need.

    The pandemic resulted in a lot of people giving things away. Plenty of charities were overwhelmed. I think that has changed a touch now, and I decided to go through some of the things we have around and drop them off at the local Goodwill office. There are other places that can take things, but I know they sell things cheaply to people in need, and they use the money to help others.

    For me, I took some sports equipment that my kids had lightly used and bundled it up, taking it in. I also had some extra jackets that were barely worn. I’ve got too many, so I took some down for others to use.

    We had a vanity as well that didn’t work for a remodel this year. We tried to sell it, but it didn’t work, so I packed it up and donated it to Habitat for them to sell.

  • Daily Coping 23 Dec 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to contact someone who may be alone or feeling isolated.

    I’ve done this a few times, but this is another good excuse to do so. I know a couple people that live alone, and I’ve worried about them a bit. I reached out and chatted a bit, just asking how they were and engaging in a bit of a conversation.

    It was good to touch base and I actually reached out to a second friend to check on them.

    It’s easy to forget how different someone else’s live might be and how lonely it can be to not be with others this time of year.

  • Searching dbatools–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    I learned something new about dbatools. That’s using the Find-DbaCommand cmdlet, which is handier than Get-Command. I’ll show you why in this post.

    Searching PowerShell

    You can search for commands with Get-Command. If I search for “key” in the dbatools module, I’d run this:

    Get-Command *key* -Module dbatools

    This returns me a number of items. In fact, it returns 11 items.

    2021-11-20 11_56_58-C__Users_Steve (Admin)

    That’s not bad, and this is how I’ve often been looking for command when I’m coding. This is faster than going to the index page on the site.

    Find-DbaCommand

    I was reading the upcoming dbatools in a Month of Lunches, and saw the Find-DbaCommand listed. If I use this, and include “key”, I get different results.

    2021-11-20 11_59_14-C__Users_Steve (Admin)

    This might be more than I want, but I thought this was a neat addition to the dbatools module to help someone find commands quickly.

    It is definitely easier than going to dbatools.io and trying to search for a command in the command list.

    SQLNewBlogger

    I learned something, and I sketched out how to explain it to someone. I took 5 minutes to knock this post together. You could do the same thing, but expand on a way that you actually use this to find a command.

    Might teach someone how a skill. Might even teach someone that wants to interview you.