Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Up Your Value

    This editorial was originally published on Mar 5, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I have a presentation that I give to a number of user groups on how to better brand yourself in these modern times. It’s based on my experiences over the last decade as I’ve grown my brand and been successful doing so based on the number of jobs I’ve been offered. I’ve drawn upon a lot of my experiences, as well as conversations I’ve had with others about what’s worked for them as well as what hasn’t.

    I noticed that I’m not the only person thinking about this and read a great blog by Kendal Van Dyke on Showing Your Value that covers some similar ideas. He talks about showing your value to your employer, which is something that I bring up in my presentation, and I think is important in these turbulent times.

    I’m not sure what the outlook is for DBAs and developers in 2009. I keep seeing information that shows things are going well for IT employees interspaced with all the announcements of cost-cutting and layoffs. I’ve talked with people that have a number of open positions and are hiring. I’ve talked to some that are reducing staff through attrition and have no plans to lay people off, and I’ve talked with people that have been told their company will downsize. I think it really depends on your company’s particular situation, and you should try to learn as much as you can about that.

    Regardless of whether you need to look for a job or not, I do think that it pays to look for ways to bring value to your employer, and your own career as well. And I think that you should document those things. You should know what you’ve accomplished over the last xxx months and be ready to bring that to the attention of your management during review time.

    Part of being a professional, in my opinion, is helping others do their jobs better. It might be passing along knowledge, it might be making a suggestion or giving someone a tool they can use, it might be changing the way you do something to save resources. These are things you can just do in a humble way, as a part of your daily work. I know many people are uncomfortable with being in the spotlight and bringing attention to themselves and that’s fine.

    However in our busy lives, with so much happening in our careers, it’s easy for your boss to forget how much you’ve done to help out him and/or the company. Keeping a record of these things, and bringing them to his attention is a good idea. It’s important for you to ensure you are managing your career and not letting it drag you along.

    And if you don’t have any way of showing your value, perhaps you ought to think about that as well.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

    The podcast feeds are now available atsqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

    Overall RSS Feed:  or now on iTunes! 

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Recharge and Relax

    My boss informed me a couple months ago that I had 30 days of vacation stored up and needed to take some. I mentioned this to my wife and she scolded me for not taking enough time off the last couple of years. Laughter ensued when I reminded her that she struggles to find even one day off every two week as she grows her horse training business. At least I take weekends off.

    Most of the time.

    I scheduled a few days in August and September, and enjoyed the time off, but I put off any more scheduling until I got another note from my boss two weeks ago saying I needed to schedule at least 16 days off before the end of the year. I’ve got a busy schedule, with 3 more trips between now and the end of 2013, along with a few other work commitments, so it’s hard to actually find that many days in my schedule. I somehow managed, and while it’s all in one and two day segments, I did schedule 17 days before the end of 2013.

    I do know vacation is important. Life is short, and even though I really enjoy my job, I do need to get away and spend time living the rest of my life. It’s entirely too easy to get caught up working too many hours in the technology business, voluntarily or involuntarily. We need to make sure we take advantage of our time off and get away from the stress of our careers. I encourage each of you to make sure you are taking your vacation each year and getting time away from work.

    This starts tomorrow, with two days off this week, and continues through November and December. As a result, I’ll be gone quite a bit through the end of the year. I’ve got a few guest writers and some re-runs, and I hope that people still enjoy the newsletter each day. If not, let me know, and we’ll make better plans for next year.

    Steve Jones

    As a side note, I’ve had 4 friends pass away in the last 3 years. All were under 50 years of age. Life is truly short.

    Video and Audio versions

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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  • Minor Problems

    When I speak to people about blogging to increase the visibility of their brand, one of the questions I often hear from them is “what do I write about?” My advice is to take the every day occurrences, the things that come up in the course of your job, and write about them. It doesn’t matter if everyone else has written about backing up SQL Server databases, or writing a query to find duplicate rows; it matters if you have written about it. A potential employer often your blog as due diligence on your skills, including the way you communicate information to others through your writing.

    However most of us also encounter these seemingly trivial, minor problems that plague our environments. We find creative solutions to the problems, solutions that others might not think of. They don’t seem to be worth sharing. I hear so many SQL Server professionals belittle their work, thinking that anyone could build the same solution. That might be true, but for every problem you solve, there are probably others working with SQL Server that would benefit from hearing about your work.

    New people come into the SQL Server community all the time. There will be people that connect to SQL Server with Management Studio for the first time and back up a database. This week someone is writing their first T-SQL query and executing it. The trivial, simple solutions that you develop for common problems might just help one of these beginners learn something, and solve a problem their first week as an accidental DBA.

    Write about the common things you do. Share the solutions you develop. Pay it forward, since most of us have gotten help already from someone else in the community doing the same thing.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Database Queries and Scalability

    I ran across this post with a very provocative title:  (thanks Brent Ozar Unlimited). It’s an interesting read from a developer, talking about how so many website designs aren’t built for scalable because they rely too heavily on a set of database queries place on every page. If you expect a database query to retrieve or store a user id, or other data on every page, then you are limited to the scalability of your database back end. There’s no doubt there, but the author has ideas that can help you overcome these issues.

    One of the problems is that systems read and write account information (or registrations) to the database directly. That’s definitely a scale issue, and the author suggests generating the client information on the web server and storing it in a more robust and scalable backend. That makes sense, but it’s with the caveat that ” As long as you eventually write the data to the db later on, you’re good to go.” Good point, but now you need a replication process of some sort (or messaging) that gets the data to your database. This ignores some of the synchronization issues across multiple servers as well, but it’s not a bad idea.

    The idea of avoiding joins, by using a cached set of data to iterate through and pull data from other tables may work in some cases, but I’m not sure this is the most efficient way of grabbing data from a database, ensuring it’s the latest data, and not impacting concurrency. This technique seems to invalidate the power of an RDBMS by not using joins to effectively, and efficiently, retrieve data. I suspect replicated copies of slowly changing data is a better way of scaling your system than avoiding joins.

    Overall I don’t love the article, and depending on which platforms and technologies you’re using, it might be better, or worse, advice. I would say that building better systems involves considering alternative techniques, allowing for failures, and using new techniques like messaging, caching, asynchronous processes and more. As we try to improve the quality of our software, we should be talking about, writing about, and trying out new techniques, learning what can work better in our environments.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 22.3MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 25.7MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 5.2MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

    To submit an article, rant or editorial,
    log in to the Contribution Center