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Category: Blog

Grinding Away: Kobe Bryant

I saw this story from Robert Horry, one of the greatest clutch shooters in basketball. Don’t know it’s true, but I think it is.

When I got traded to the Lakers in ’97, Kobe Bryant was just a rookie. The dude couldn’t shoot threes. We would play this shooting game every day after practice. It was me, Kobe, Brian Shaw, Mitch Richmond and Kurt Rambis. Kobe would lose every time. We would get to practice the next day and sure enough, Kobe would already be there shooting nothing but threes. Like clockwork, at the end of practice he’d say, “Let’s play the game! I’m ready for you.” And we would beat his ass again.

He would never stop. It was incredible. He practiced until one day, a couple months later, he finally won. If you literally said, “Kobe, I bet you can’t make five in a row by dropping the ball and kicking it in from half court,” that motherfucker would go out there and practice it until he could do it. And that’s what people don’t understand when they talk about champions — when they talk about a winner’s mentality. Kobe’s dedication to the game is unreal.

In case you think this isn’t true, listen to Kobe in this interview.

Why I like this

To compete against others, you have to work harder. I tell kids I coach that it isn’t enough to get better in sports, but you have to get better faster than others are getting better. That takes work, it takes setbacks, it takes failures. It takes effort to overcome those to get better.

You might not have the raw talent to be one of the best every in your area, but you can be really, really good, and you can compete with many others.

The modern world, with jobs being remote, companies hiring everywhere, more tech people wanting jobs, you need to compete well, which means work.

Work to improve.

Why I don’t like this

I do think that Kobe worked in a very narrow domain, playing his sport. His sport didn’t change much, and he just needed to improve his skills, while knowing how to work against others. He was competing in a narrower space, against many knowns.

For many of us, our world is more complex, with many more dimensions of new technologies, unknown demands or desires from employers (or potential employers), and an every growing set of things that appear in our industry.

Driving to continue to be better is good, but you’ll never get to be amazing in everything in tech, or even one platform. Keep some balance and remember there are other important things in your life. Not so important you shouldn’t improve, but important enough to require some of your time.

November 25, 2024
Episode 11 of Simple Talks: Oracle

The 11th episode is now live, recorded a few weeks ago at the PASS Data Community Summit. This was a lot of fun, us grabbing a space in the convention center and putting this together.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4sLQQR7DgYDPj2Ob1muIgU?si=e1589ae8d52947dd

Also on Apple Podcasts

November 22, 2024
A New Word: Mornden

mornden – n. the self-container pajama universe shared by two people on a long weekend morning, withdrawing from the world and letting the hours slow to a crawl, coming as close as they’ll ever get to pausing the flow of time, even as they know it’ll eventually rush back in all the faster.

My wife and I used to enjoy mornden early in our relationship. We’d get the Sunday paper, make breakfast, and lay around, reading, relaxing, enjoying the morning. These days, no paper, but we do try and get a couple mornings a week where we sleep in a bit, lay in bed, chat, read, just relax.

We are both (too) type-A and are very busy. Taking a some time to relax each week, pausing time for a few hours, is good.

Life certainly rushes in fast when we get back to it.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

November 22, 2024
Using SQL Compare with Read-only Access

Recently a customer asked if SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used with a read-only database as a source. It’s a good questions as I’ve seen some tools that create temp tables or do some other work in a source database, which might cause problems. Certainly someone running SQL Compare against production would want to ensure it works as a read-only application.

This post will look at SQL Compare with a read-write database but a user account with read-only access. My previous post looked at a read-only database.

This is part of a series of posts on SQL Compare.

Setup

I’ve got a couple of databases that I use for Compare demos. In this case, compare5_prod and compare1. The compare5_prod is set to read write, which is normal.

I created a new login, which will default to the Compare5_prod database.

This login maps to a user, which has read only rights in the database.

In my compare setup, I’ll use this login to connect to the database.

As you can see below, Compare works fine, even reading the various system metadata tables:

This works because SQL Compare is not writing anything to the database. We read metadata and then process that in-memory on the client before returning the results.

You can see this also works in SQL Data Compare. Here’s the connection:

And here are the results

Summary

This was a very simple example, but I find that clients always would prefer to see examples already completed and proof that something works when they are evaluating software. Hopefully this helps answer this question.

SQL Compare is an amazing tool that millions of users have enjoyed for 25 years. If you’ve never tried it, give it an eval today and see what you think.

November 20, 2024