Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Time Off

    I’m booking vacation. I know I recommend balance, and tell people to take vacation, and that I’m bad at it. My wife is right there with me. I’m not sure who’s worse, but we both struggle to make time away from work. It’s good and bad. We enjoy our careers, but we do need time away.

    My boss told me a few months ago that I had 30 days on the books. I can carry 5 and sell 5, so I needed to take some time off this fall. I did manage to book 4 or 5 days, but I heard from her last week that I still needed to take at least 16 more.

    So….

    Today I went through the calendar, looked at commitments, and decided to take some time off. No full weeks, since my schedule makes that hard. Long periods away from work end up compressing my work into before/after days, which I don’t like. I also have DBW commitments that are hard to move since they impact others.

    However I have a list of 17 days to take off in 1 and 2 day increments.

  • It Still Happens – Full Transaction Log

    Probably the most often asked question on SSC is about full transaction logs, and often full disks. It happened again recently. I don’t have an exact count of threads, but rough searches show this to have 70,000+ results, when most other searches I run show many, many fewer results in the forums.

    I talked about this recently in my backup talk on the SQL in the City tour stops. Back up your logs.

  • Getting Started with CI and Databases

    It’s fairly easy. At least, I think it is if a salesperson can do it.

    Alex Yates, salesman extraordinaire at Red Gate Software, spent a lunch hour recently setting up a CI system so he could better understand how hard, or easy, it can be for customers. He wrote about his experiences using the Jenkins CI server.

    Check it out. If Alex can do it, I bet most of you developers and DBAs can as well.

  • Two Weeks to SQL Intersection

    If you haven’t made it to a conference this year, you’ve still got a great one to think about: SQL Intersection. The second installment of this conference, run by SQLskills (Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal) takes place in two weeks. Come to Las Vegas and learn a ton about SQL Server on October 27-30.  You can register now and if you choose the SHOW package, you’ll get an XBOX One or a Surface RT.

    I spoke at this event in the spring and it was interesting. There were some amazing speakers (Brent Ozar, Kendra Little, Joe Sack, and more), which meant I didn’t have too many questions (or attendees) at my sessions. That’s OK. If I had the chance, I’d probably rather go see those speakers talk about performance rather than some of my niche topics.

    This fall I’ve redone some sessions and built new ones. Perhaps I’ll do better as I have some developer focused topics and there will be developers and hybrid technology folks at the rest of the Dev Interestion event. With ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Azure, and Sharepoint events taking place as well, perhaps I’ll get a few people to wander over as I walk about Version Control for databases along with Automated Building and Testing of your database changes. My employer, Red Gate Software, has tools and does a lot of work in this area, and while you don’t need our tools, you do want to be sure you implement these concepts in your environment.

    I’ll also be talking about branding, but tell your boss not to worry. I’m not trying to get you a new employer, but help you stand out in your current one, get a raise, or find a better job that fits what you want to do.

    It will be chilly in most of the country by late October, but it should still be beautiful in Las Vegas. If you stick around for the weekend, Halloween in the city is something to see. Come to the conference and extend it into a vacation that you’ll never forget.

    Register today for the last big SQL Server conference I’ll be at in 2013 and I hope to see you there.