Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Three Trips

    I’m down to three trips, with most of my busy month behind me. It’s been a hard year at times, easy at others. This month I was in Vegas, LA, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Charleston, with one more trip to Vegas next week. The travel is hard, and in addition to wearing on me mentally, it compresses the rest of my time at work. That adds some stress, which bleeds over into family life for me. Some people separate well; I don’t.

    That’s OK, Despite the hard travel, I’ve enjoyed seeing so many people I know and meeting new ones. Across the 11 talks I gave this month, I enjoyed them all. I met at least one new person at each, if not more, and had some great conversations.

    Three trips left.

    The next one is SQL Intersection in Las Vegas, which will be a fun trip as my wife is coming along. Then it’s Portland for a SQL in the City seminar and a SQL Saturday in November, and a repeat in Washington D.C. in December.

    Plus vacation. I desperately need to take time off. Both for mental health, and because I’ve accumulated too much that needs to be used before the end of the year. After searching out a bit of balance last year, I didn’t do a good job this year, and need to pay more attention to things. I love my job, and I enjoy going to work, but the last month+ has been hard.

    I’m just making a note here, partly to remind you to take your own time off from work, but also to warn you I might be gone in Nov/Dec a bit from work.

     

     

  • Solving Problems at Midnight

    I couldn’t sleep last night. I was tossing and turning, struggling to rest, and it seemed I was waking up every 20 minutes.

    My demo broke. I have a talk that I’m giving at the Denver SQL Server User Group on Thursday, as practice for the same talk next week at SQL Intersection. After returning from my travels, I fired up my virtual machine on Monday and went through the talk. I’ve given a version of this as recently as 3 weeks ago, but I like to refresh myself. When I got to the third demo, I couldn’t get it to work.

    I tried a bunch of things, but the test I was sure would fail, wouldn’t. This is a significant part of my demo, and it shows how data volumes affect things. I reset the snapshot. I dropped and rebuilt the database and process. I even took a 3 hour break, going for a walk, picking up kids, and hitting a yoga class. When I returned at night, while my kids were doing their homework, I couldn’t get mine to work. I even faked the test, and caused a failure, but that wouldn’t work with an audience.

    I gave up around 9:30 and went to bed shortly thereafter. At least, I tried to, tossing and turning. My mind was all over the map, thinking about work, some projects at home, kids’ school, etc. At 2am, it hit me. All of a sudden I realized why the test wouldn’t fail. The join that was supposed to be slow, wasn’t, because it was missing some data. I was generating a large volume of data in two of the three tables, but in the third, I hadn’t linked it to my version control system. That’s why it failed.

    I don’t always have such great inspiration at night, but I have found that sometimes walking away from an issue and taking a break can help. I’ve even walked to a colleague’s desk and helped them with their own issue, and all of a sudden I realize how to solve my problem. I’ve learned to learn to be productive in other ways when I’m stuck on a particular problem, letting my subconscious mind analyze things in the background.

    This morning I linked my table and the test started failing. I have rarely been so happy to see red errors on my monitor.

  • Speaking at the October Denver SQL Server User Group

    I have a talk this Thursday at the Denver SQL Server Users Group. I’ll be talking about Continuous Integration for databases, looking at ways you can automate database builds and perform some automated testing as you move forward in your development.

    If you’re in Denver, come out and do some networking. I’m happy to do either talk, or even something else if people want.

  • 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.