It’s my first day back at work, other than a few minutes answering a couple posts on Saturday afternoon and a double check of the newsletter on Sunday. I had 6 work days off in a row, probably a record for me going back a decade at least. It’s rare that I’ve taken 5, and even then I’ve often worked through email.
This time I didn’t.
All my email comes to the iPhone, and to my laptop, and I could see the “unread” counter rising throughout the week. I didn’t check, however, trusting that important items would be handled by the rest of the publishing group at Red Gate and that most other things SQLServerCentral related could wait a week. Even on Saturday, I just flipped through a few “fun threads” just to see what was happening and ended up answering a few posts that appeared on the front page and looked interesting. Mostly for fun, and procrastinating the need to dig some holes in the yard.
It was a refreshing week, and while I was happy to come home after 6 days in the mountains, I was also glad to have a few more days off this past weekend, and get a few things done around the house. Nice, refreshing, and a great break.
Now if I can just schedule a few more, shorter, breaks before the end of the year.
I try to speak and write about career things on a regular basis because I think they’re important topics for those of you working with SQL Server. Arguably they are as important as the technical stuff. One of the things I try to preach is “balance” and making sure that you remember that we work to live, not live to work.
With that in mind, I’m searching for a bit more balance in my life. This year has involved more speaking and traveling for me, and it was too much. I have been unbalanced the last 60-90 days, but I’ve had commitments to keep and I’ve made them. It’s been hard and now I need to get back in balance.
One way I’ve wanted to do that is to ensure that I take my vacation each year. I have had a few breaks this year, but not enough, and I’m trying to rectify that. I’m on vacation from Friday, Nov 18, and won’t be back at work until Mon, Nov 28. My family and I are taking a week to ski in the mountains, and I’ll be enjoying a half day at The Woodworking Show Friday before we leave.
Enjoy your own holiday, stay away from email and work if you don’t have an emergency, and remember to have a good break next week if you get time off for the Thanksgiving holiday.
I’ve been looking at some security code in preparation for a few talks I plan on doing next year and there’s one thing I don’t see in many of the samples: backups.
When you get ready to encrypt data in a table, or you enable Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), you will end up creating a key of some sort, or a certificate. Some of these keys, especially the database master key, needs to be backed up. Otherwise you won’t be able to decrypt your database or data later on if you recover this database on another server.
As soon as you create a key for security, make sure you back it up right then. You might forget later, and then it might be too late. A little preparation will go a long way here.
I spoke at the SQL Inspire event this last weekend and it was a greart experience. This event was sponsored by Linchpin people (founded by Andy Leonard, Brian Moran, and Matt Velic) and supported by Robert Pearl, Melissa Demsak, and others in the New York/New Jersey area.
The event is modeled after the TED events, which was inspirational and informative talks that bring people together to discuss ideas and thoughts about various topics. In this case all the speakers were technologype focused people, but bringing different points of view or frames of reference to our SQL world.
The event was held at the Microsoft office in Manhattan, the same place as the SQL Saturday event held there last year. I arrived just as the event was starting, and had breakfast. There was plenty to go around, which was good as I’d forgotten to pack the protein bars I normally eat in the morning.
There was plenty of coffee as well, and I had a cup while watching the event start with Robert Pearl talking about telecommuting. He had some good ideas for people that want to work from home, including some data and arguments that you could give to your boss.
The event was structured as a series of 20 minute talks, with a few breaks throughout the day. Tom LaRock had come down from Boston with his daughter. He had a great talk about “Someday”, which as he noted, “isn’t one of the seven days of the week.” Tom cautioned people against waiting too long to do things, or putting off the parts of their career that are important to them, or even the simple things that need to be done in every environment, like making sure you have good backups. He had one point in the talk where he was looking forward to things in the future, and he choked up while mentioning the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. It was a touching moment, and I was choked up as well thinking about my little girl.
SQL Someday
Michael Coles talked about the job market, Andrew Brust talked about Big Data, and Brian Moran talked about Linchpin people and how he is trying to change the way that people view their work and their business. Michael Corey had a great talk about how he had grown his career from DBA to CEO of a consulting company and how he runs a successful, moral, well balanced place to work. I grabbed a card from him and will keep NTirety, his company, in mind if I ever need a job. They seem to work the way I’d like to work.
My talk was right after lunch and titled “Finding Balance”. My focus was on the ways in which we can all manage to improve our careers, get raises, promotions, etc., while still managing to have a life. I’ll blog about it more, but the main ideas were three things I think are important to balancing out your life.
– Learn to say no
– Play your own game
– Balance
The entire event was video taped and recorded, and I believe that the videos will be available in a few weeks for people to view. There were about 60 or so people there throughout the day, and they seemed to enjoy the talks. Quite a few people came up to me and other speakers at the end to thank us for the information we presented, and they seemed to be making notes or engaged with the speakers during the day.
Video by And Now Video
There were a number of sponsors that helped bring this event to fruition, including my employer, Red Gate Software, along with Confio, Embarcadero, and Microsoft.
This was a much different type of event than many SQL Saturdays. The talks focused on abstract, more soft-skill topics, that were designed to inspire you, and get you to re-think the way that your career is progressing. I hope there are more of these events, or even that they can be held alongside other SQL Saturday events as a change of pace from the strictly technical presentations.
New York City was great, with mild weather on a November weekend. The sun shined as I went for a run out to Central Park on Saturday morning. I stayed at The Pod hotel, which is a hostel, and an ecclectic change of pace from many other places I’ve visited. We had a few people come out after the event to share a few beers and talk about the event, life, and a few other topics.
My thanks to Andy, Brian, and Matt and I hope they are able to run a few of these events in other places in 2012.
Voice of the DBA 