Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Life is Short

    Dave McIntosh, RIP

    I woke up on Easter morning to an email. A good friend, someone I’ve known for years as a fellow parent in both Girl and Boy Scouts, had

    passed away on Saturday in a plane crash. It was shocking news, made even more sad knowing his family had been present and had seen the crash. My friend, David McIntosh, is survived by his wife and four children and may he rest in peace.

    Over the last few years I have written quite a bit on taking charge of your career, on making an effort to improve your technical skills, and learning to better market yourself. My goal has been to inspire and motivate others to pursue a vocation they enjoy.  I have noted many times that life is too short to take a crappy job, and if you find yourself in such a situation, take steps to make a change.

    Along the way I hav

    e also tried to caution people to find a balance in their lives. Remember that while you invest for the future, you should also live for today.

    Enjoy your life, and embrace it. Smell the roses, and look for the positive side to situations.

    Life can be short. I was reminded of that this weekend in a shocking way.  I hope that you all enjoy long, healthy, successful , and happy lives. I also hope that you remember to appreciate and enjoy the good parts of your lives every day.

    Steve Jones

    My apologies for the lack of a podcast today. The audio and video podcasts will return tomorrow.

  • Happy Easter 2011

    Happy Easter

    This weekend is the Easter holiday weekend around the world and with today being Good Friday, it’s a vacation day for me.

    The ski slopes are closing this weekend and if the weather is good, I’ll be heading up for one last day of sliding down Copper mountain today. Winter is when I tend to take a lot of vacation and this weekend is the end of that season for me.

    Hopefully everyone is having a quiet day if you are at work, with nothing broken and no deployments scheduled over the holiday. I know that holidays are often the best time for deployments to occur for the business as there are less people working on the systems. When I worked as a production DBA, especially in places where the systems were usually in use 24 hours a day by other employees, holidays were the only time we could schedule extended outages.

    As much as that can be frustrating to IT people that want to get a break on the holidays, I think that the IT business, like some other businesses, require you to trade some holiday work for time off at other parts of the year. My previous careers in the restaurant and hospitality business had me working many holidays, and I know that many people in retail positions also end up working holidays like Easter.

    My advice to find a balance in your life is to negotiate a rotation for IT covereage on holidays and perhaps even ask for two days off if you have to work this one holiday. There are lots of progressive companies that do recognize a hardship for holiday work, but plenty of others that don’t have an IT policy since most workers take the holiday off. People that work on an hourly basis usually get twice their rate for holiday work, why not salaried IT workers?

    Enjoy the weekend and enjoy the blooper reel today.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Saying Thank You

    This plane left without me 😦

    Recently I had problems with one of my flights. That’s nothing new, and as Grant Fritchey noted, I tend to anger the travel gods for some reason and often find myself in situations that make me regret ever leaving the ranch. In this case, I flew to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, which was fairly close to SQL Saturday #63. I attended the event, and drove back early Sunday morning in time to have some coffee before my flight. I walked in, went straight to security with no bags to check and a mobile boarding pass. I scanned my phone 4 or 5 times before the security guard told me to leave.

    Actually he didn’t tell me to leave, and was very polite in asking me to go check with the airline for a new boarding pass. The airline agent informed me that my flight was out of Love field (new service starting that day) and despite my early arrival, I wouldn’t make it to Love field in time.  I was stunned as I had booked a flight like I normally do: pick an outbound flight, then an inbound one. I  have never been presented choices from a different airports for the return flight, but in this case that was what happened.

    I could have gotten upset, especially after spending 5 hours in the DFW airport waiting for another flight. Instead I tried something else. I sent a nice note to Expedia, letting them know that despite my issues, I am pleased with the way that they provide a booking service on the web. I have used their site for years, and it’s been a nice tool for me, allowing me to keep all of my data in one place. Their services have expanded over time and I like their service. I then told them of my issue, and noted that it might have been a bug or a glitch, but in any case, it was an inconvenience for me.

    It was a strange situation for me, and a convergence of a few things. My inattention to detail, new service for an airline, and a large city with multiple airports. I rarely fly to cities with more than one airport to choose from, and was willing to accept some of the blame. However I also know that application developers try to build applications that work, and a little praise is always appreciated.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Mentoring Experiment

    The Mentoring Experiment
    http://thementoringexperiment.org/

    As I have progressed through my career, I’ve worked hard, read and studied constantly, and asked lots of questions of others. All that has helped me to improve my skills and better understand my craft. However there is more to growing a data professional career than just learning to better work with the technology.

    One thing that helped me a few times was the ability to talk to other people in my companies that were more experienced in life and business. These were people that I reported to, directly or indirectly, who were willing to listen and offer me some insight and advice on my career. They were mentors, but unfortunately they were few and far between in my career.

    It made me wonder if I might have made some better decisions, or made different decisions earlier in my career if I had been able to call on a mentor more regularly.  Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) and I talked about this being a problem that we both shared in our careers, and one that we see many people struggling with today. Our discussions led us to wonder if there might be a way to develop a mentoring framework that would help people grow their careers in a way that is better suited to each individual.

    The Mentoring Experiment is our initial attempt to build such a framework. It’s a short cycle, with the idea that we are seeking to learn some lessons about mentoring while helping people with advice and insight from mentors that we respect.  We hope that we can find some patterns that allow us to facilitate the bonding of mentors with mentees.

    We are taking applications until Apr 30, and while Andy and I will be mentoring people, we have a list of mentors from the SQL Server community that we respect and think will be good mentors for data professionals looking for help in better understanding their careers and where they want to go in the future.

    We’ll be blogging about the process, respecting everyone’s privacy along the way, and we hope to expand and grow this experiment over the next few years into something that gives back to the community, and hopefully helps many data professionals grow careers that they benefit from and greatly enjoy.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts