Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Recharging and Cooling Off

    A couple days with my wife in the mountains is just what I need.  We’ll be out of touch the next few days, just us and the dogs, doing some hiking and relaxing.

    I’m trying to meet the goal of having used up 60% of my vacation by the end of Sept. I think I’ll be a day short, but I’m busy enough that it’s tough to find enough places I can get away and still manage the workload.

    Part of that’s my fault, as I was delaying booking days off, thinking we might go somewhere. Finally I decided to just book time away. Thur/Fri this week and next. I’m a little jammed up Mon-Wed, but it’s worth it to not take a laptop and get away.

  • Daily Coping 17 Sep 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to let go of being busy. Allow yourself to take some breaks today.

    I’m on holiday today, a welcome break as I try to comply with my 60% taken by the end of this month. As a result, I’m not trying to be busy. I asked my wife if we could take a couple days and just relax. No horses, no chores, no plans.

    We’ll pack a few clothes, which is really the biggest stress item today. Then we’ll put the dogs in the car and drive to the mountains to stay for a few days.

    A welcome break.

  • Git Tricks–Getting a New Remote Branch–#SQLNewBlogger

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

    This is probably more for me than anyone, but as I’ve been working in more team demos, I find I need to up my git skills. In this case, a fellow team member created a new branch, and I needed to get it on my local machine.

    I know many git clients will make this easy, but I always like to see what happens at the CLI. This keeps my skills fresh, and I can see all the git output, some of which might be hidden in a client.

    In this case, the team member had created a branch on Github. I’ll demo this by creating my own branch as feature/demotest. I see the branch online.

    2020-08-18 15_30_25-way0utwest_dbascripts at feature_demotest

    However, I don’t see it locally.

    2020-08-18 15_31_00-cmd

    If I know the name, I get fetch this, or pull it, from the remote. In this case, either of these code items will work.

    git pull origin feature/demotest

    or

    git fetch origin feature/demotest

    Once I do this, I can checkout the branch, which will match the remote with this code:

    git checkout feature/demotest

    2020-08-18 15_32_56-cmd

    Now it’s a branch that is tracking the remote with my local copy.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This was a quick Google search to figure out how to do this, but since I’ve had to search a couple times in the last month, I decided to write this and cement the knowledge in my head. At least, I hope it does.

    This took about 5 minutes to write and demo. A quick thing, but a good way to show some learning and knowledge on your blog.

  • Daily Coping 16 Sep 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to aim to be good enough, rather than perfect

    This has often been how I’ve tackled my job. I do the best job I can, but I also need to get things done more so than constantly re-evaluating and refactoring something. My view has been that we can find time if this is important.

    I know that can be a bad technique with regards to performance in code. Lots of issues in software can be traced to poor decisions that no one every makes a priority to fix. I’ve got more than a few of these in my past, and currently at SQLServerCentral.

    However, what I want to do is to the best job I can with the information and knowledge I have. That also means that I need to adjust my habits and patterns as I learn more. It’s easy to fall back on old habits in a hurry, rather than actually using knowledge of how to do something better.

    I am trying to do better there, but also trying to get things done which work, without berating myself for not making things perfect. Recently I had to put down baseboard trim (skirt boards) and some weren’t perfect with walls that had small concave and convex sections, and floors that weren’t level. I didn’t get perfection, and that was OK.

    Plus, caulk and paint will fix some minor issues.