Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Burnout

    I’m sure that many people end going through burnout at some point in their career. While most of us might enjoy technology, and we get a kick out of working with data, at some point you’re not going to like your job. This could be because you’re overworked, or it could be that you don’t have enough to do. Either way, I would bet that many people flow through the phases of burnout that Kendra Little documented in this post.

    Burnout isn’t necessarily the end of a job, but it is a state that most of us wouldn’t want to remain in. Apart from disliking your own situation, and perhaps annoying your fellow employees, you certainly aren’t helping your career. Especially if you are in stages 1 or 2.

    I’ve seen stage 3 be positive or negative, but it doesn’t really work out well to try and outwork the job. Most of the time this leads to unhealthy levels of work for you, and unrealistic future expectations for your employer. When things aren’t going well, do as Kendra suggests and address the issues. Make those small changes that adjust your attitude and help you cope better. Smile, try to view the things that bother you from the perspective of others, and  look to keep perspective with what you do. Most of us aren’t in life-threatening or hazardous jobs, and we should remember that.

    If you think you’re burned out and really need to switch jobs, make a plan to move on. Looking for another job is stressful, and it’s hard, but the best time to do it is while you have another job. Take your time and make a good decision for your future. Perhaps the project of looking for a new job will help ease the troubles you face at this one.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Inception

    This editorial was originally published on Sep 7, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I recently went to see the movie Inception on the recommendation of my wife. She had taken one of my sons to see it and loved it, so she convinced me to go. She actually enjoyed it so much that she went back a third time with another son to see it again.

    The movie is interesting, and deals with the possibility of planting an idea in someone’s head through a dream. It’s a very well done movie, and I recommend it if you haven’t seen it. It’s definitely science fiction (I hope) and not something I think is possible, but it is a very well done movie and gets you to consider the possibility.

    It’s Friday, and no, I’m not asking you what you think about the movie. I’m not looking for more movie recommendations, and I’m not asking if you think inception is possible. Instead, I want to ask you a more basic question, looking for how you find inspiration.

    How do you get your ideas?

    We all work with SQL Server, we solve problems, and we have to write code. More and more I see the work we do in building technological solutions as art, based in science. We must be creative in how we come up with a solution,  and then use best practices and proven techniques to implement the solution.

    Most of us are at work when we respond, so the answers can be based on how you develop solutions in code. But if you have a way that helps you think, a technique that focuses you on any problem, let us know this Friday. Maybe you’ll help someone else find a way to think more creatively about the problems they face.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Too Large a Workload?

    I often hear the technical staff in many organizations complaining about the amount of work they are tasked with managing. Plenty of technology professionals view their jobs are stressful, and I’ve had no shortage of people say they would never recommend their job, or even this industry, to others as a career choice.

    That’s unsurprising to me, which is a little sad. I’ve felt that we face a dilemma in this industry. Our skills are easy to acquire, with any of us able to learn new skills and gaining knowledge as quickly as we are able. Often, our ability to learn is limited only by the time and effort we put into understanding a skill, not any external factor.

    However that also means that our employers seem to expect that we can learn without training, quickly, on our own, and that we can instantly be experts that make computer systems do our bidding. When we can’t respond quickly enough, or as quickly as we did for the last request, our managers feel that we’re just being lazy this week.

    Perhaps we do respond quickly, and get tasked with even more work. This might not be the case for most of you, or even many of you. I’m sure plenty of you are in situations where your managers understand the complexity of your jobs, but I wanted to ask about your situation:

    Do you have too large a workload at your current job?

    By this I mean, do you feel you’re not able to get enough work done in a reasonable work week and you feel pressure to work longer hours. Are your managers asking you to do more than you think they should? Or do they appreciate that, like many endeavors, working with technology takes time.

    Certainly I think many of us could work more efficiently by automating tasks, but depending on the variety and complexity of tasks, as well as the amount of time you can invest in completing future work quicker, you might be stuck in situations that just require more hours. If that’s the case, I hope your workload isn’t too large, but let us know.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • You Better Learn to Work at Scale

    Early in my career, I worked on a large Novell Netware installation. We bought a server that was about 1/4 the size of a modern rack, which contained a number of blade slots each holding some type of hardware: CPUs, disk adapters, network adapters, and even disk drives. The disk slots held ~30MB drives, which were large for that time. Both in capacity, and physical size. Each of these monsters weighed a pound or more, and felt like it was built to withstand a fall from a table top.

    That’s one reason that I’m amazed by the 64GB storage in my phone and stunned by the 500GB mSata card I recently bought. The storage capacities we have available to us today, in small companies and startups, are truly stunning to us as data professionals, but not to the people that have the space available. It seems on a regular basis people easily fill up the space they have and clamor for more. Whether that’s valuable data or not, I do know that much of that data still requires management and takes effort from us as data professionals.

    We’re not going to get more help, so as our databases grow, we need to find ways to manage more data, of disparate forms. Not just rows in tables, but Excel files, binary files of all sorts, XML extracts, Office documents, Hadoop hives and who knows what else. We need to be better at working with varying patterns of data, and perhaps files, at scale in order to continue to efficiently manage our workloads.

    Just like system administrators that are starting to deal with hundreds or thousands of virtual instances, we have to be able to write code that helps us manage data in large quantities. I like PowerShell for more and more tasks, but without a doubt, writing efficient T-SQL that works with sets, learning SSIS, package design patterns, and more will become the skills that differentiate the valuable and capable DBAs from those that just keep the lights on.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed