Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • A Refreshing Break

    Taking a break on the Winter Park slopes

    Thanksgiving is always the biggest break from work for me each year. My family goes away for a almost a week of skiing to take a break away from our busy lives. Last week I was gone, taking 6 whole days away from work and I came back this week, with a lot of emails, articles, and various other work here at SQLServerCentral.

    This time, however, I tried something completely new. I didn’t check my email from SQLServerCentral, visit the site, or do anything else work related during the time away. That’s a first for me, as the last few years I’ve been pruning emails on my phone during vacation, handling minor items as I had time. It was hard, since my email client would show an ever increasing count of unread messages, but I made a point of not working during the time away.

    I was very refreshed when I came back this week, enjoying a couple days over the weekend of catching up on chores around the house. For the first time in a long time I wasn’t anxious to get back to work, and I completely enjoyed the time away. It never felt like checking a few emails was that distracting, but it was, and it made quite a difference for me.

    It’s the holiday season, work usually slows down, and many people take some time off around the Christmas and New Years holidays. I’d urge you to avoid email and work completely, even on your smartphone when you have a few minutes. Keep a book around, start a few Words with Friends games, or use some other leisure distraction to give you a complete break from work and see if you come back refreshed.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Thinking Time

    My Thinking Time

    I have a friend that is responsible for working with clients, helping them to design solutions for their businesses, write statements of work, and develop proof of concepts. This friend also finds 4-5 meetings a day on their calendar, usually lasting from thirty to sixty minutes. That’s not an uncommon workday for many people in technology, which always amazes me.

    There was a time when I managed multiple DBAs and worked to remove them from meetings whenever possible. It was hard, with the workers always feeling like they wanted to know what was going on, and managers always wanting staff available for detailed updates if needed. Too often I felt that staff time in meetings, and performing updates, was wasted. Managers should take quick updates to meetings, and handle the coordination as much as possible.

    Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) always talks about how important thinking time is, and over the years I’ve learned that’s important. The work that we do is knowledge based. By definition that requires thought, creativity, and most importantly, time. We need to have concentrated time to think, and to work out how we want to attack the problems we face, without the pressure of producing some specific solution.

    I know it’s easy to view thinking time as an opportunity to waste time, and some people surely will waste the time. However for those of you that work hard, and that are trying to solve issues, it’s important to get some thinking time, time when you’re not actually writing code and step back to view the problem from another angle. I’d encourage you to take some time to just think over the holiday season, when there usually is less work going on, and see if it can help you produce higher quality results.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Snack Attack

    One of my favorite snacks

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 11, 2007 and is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    OK, I’ve done a bunch of editorials on security this week. It’s been in the news, it’s a new year, everyone’s making resolutions to implement better security, some bugs were found, so security has been a topic. Actually it was last week when I found these links and started sketching topics, but that’s another story.

    So today I wanted to take a break from the serious stuff. I found this link awhile back, Snacksby, which is an interesting idea. It’s an idea that a friend actually pitched something similar to me years ago, but she never got it going. So with that idea, this week’s poll is:

    What’s Your Favorite Snack while working?

    I know, I know, not a great poll question for the IT crowd, but maybe something will strike your fancy. Maybe you’ll discover a new snack from a response from someone else. Maybe I’ll get to be a spokesman.

    The only thing that I’ve usually craved when I’m working, and it’s pretty rare, is a Dairy Queen Blizzard, preferable something with peanut butter in it. There used to be one a block over when I worked in Virginia as a developer. The team would walk over a few times a week when the weather was warm for a break.

    Since then I usually have water and diet coke at my side, but that’s about it. Still once in awhile I swing by for an afternoon snack and quick sugar rush.

  • Power Tools at Work

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 17, 2007. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation. 

    Now this could be fun. Just imagine your boss comes to your cube with an electric drill, a sledgehammer, and a circular saw. Oh, and don’t forget the safety glasses. You’ve got work to do.

    That’s what is happening in some IT shops as old data drives need to be destroyed with no hope of the data being recovered. I saw this article on data demolition and thought that might actually be a fun afternoon at work. Destroy some old data drives, ending their usefulness like the fax machine in “Office Space” 🙂

    Data security is becoming a bigger issue all the time in the corporate world. And as more companies store more and more data on disk, the issues with disposal must be dealt with by more and more IT groups.

    I guess you could hire a firm and get this before and after picture:

    Now this might be fun.

     

    but I’d think that defeats the purpose somehow. It’s the physical access outside your company that can be the problem. Going to a vendor specializing in destruction could be a problem since it gives criminals a single source (or a smaller source) or vendors they can bribe to get critical data. Better off letting different people in your company destroy the data at random intervals. That way no one can predict where and when the data will be destroyed.

    Plus it would be fun 🙂