Tag: career

This is part of a series that looks at interview questions that you might be asked.

One of the cornerstones of a relational database is normalization. This is a database design technique that is used to decide how we might distribute data among tables and columns. If someone were to ask you “what is normalization” in your next job interview, what would you say? How do you answer this question?

Depending on the position, and your experience, perhaps you’d talk about this in practical terms, with an example. Maybe you have a scenario you use to explain the concepts. I tend to lean towards an e-commerce type database, with orders, customers, and products. That’s an easy concept for people to grasp. I can then give examples of how normalization might change the way we store data.

Do you there are various forms of normalization? We can talk about first, second, third, fourth, or other normal forms of the database. Perhaps you can explain these from memory? Maybe you know the academic definitions. Maybe you have your own description. I certainly think if the position may involve designing tables that you should be able to talk about the differences between these forms and determine what form a particular database is in.

My answer would include quick explanations of how I would avoid repeating groups, columns not dependent on the PK, and how sometimes the third normal form starts to impact performance because of the number of joins required for simple queries. I would also be ready to expand on these topics, explaining what a PK is and how to choose one.

This is a complex topic,and I doubt an interviewer would expect anyone to provide a thirty minute lecture, which wouldn’t completely cover the topic. Instead, I would think that if an interviewer is interested in this topic, they will ask probing questions to determine if you understand the concepts. This means you can’t just memorize the definition. You should ensure that if I have you a table, you could break it down into the entities for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd normal form. Perhaps you should read a few basic articles to get some understanding. Maybe you need to delve a little deeper into design and the anomalies that normalization attempts to mitigate.

Prepping for an interview shouldn’t be a cram session to learn more, but really a review of concepts you understand. Make sure you have some examples to explain your thoughts and practice a few of these questions with a friend by giving them an answer and listening to their feedback.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

Many of us work for some organization and get paid to do so. We might work for ourselves or others, but every so often we hope to get some renumeration for our efforts. For most of us, we negotiated some pay rate and then hope to get annual raises the reflect our work product.

The interesting thing that I’ve learned in many years of changing jobs and negotiating pay is that many of us have no idea what others doing similar jobs are being paid. There isn’t a set scale of pay, unlike many other industries, and since our jobs can vary dramatically from organization to organization, despite having similar titles, we may learn that our compensation deviates dramatically from others in similar situations.

Last year SQLServerCentral ran a salary survey and then released the aggregated data. This was a quick attempt to help you understand where you might stand relative to others, and it was very popular. Brent Ozar took our survey a step further, with a more detailed set of questions and data. This year Brent has beat us to the punch, with a new survey for 2017. I encourage you to participate and help build a useful data set. I plan on doing our own in the new year, probably this month, and hopefully we’ll have two good sets of data that you can review and analyze.

Most of us are data professionals, and we know that having more information helps us to make better decisions. Filling out these anonymous surveys can help others understand where they might stand relative to you and vice versa. This is the type of data that can enable you to better negotiate your own pay in the future. After all, there’s nothing like presenting some data professional specific results to management to help your case that an adjustment might be needed.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

It’s been a good holiday for me. I had a week’s vacation with just my wife, a nice holiday with kids, and a relaxing week where I’m trying to get a few things done. I’ve been away from my home office for two weeks, and it often takes a few days to get used to focusing again at the computer, but I’m getting there. It doesn’t help that the office, err, house is full of people with my kids away from school.

The year is coming to a close, and it’s a slow week, as I noted yesterday. However, I’m refreshed and recharged. Getting away on an adventure, without a computer to spent time on was great. I did no work and just enjoyed the time away. That’s how a vacation should go, and it’s the type of trip I need to take more often.

Now it’s time to move forward again. As I wrote about in my goals post, I’m planning on spending some time thinking how to achieve my learning goals in 2018. Today is that day, with an hour set aside to do a little research for resources and attempting to build some sort of calendar with milestones that will help me move forward. Those are the personal items for my career, tangential to my work.

The other part of today is really digging into where I want SQLServerCentral to go next year. We need to be mobile friendly moving forward (thanks for the push, Google) and that means some code changes. I want to be more involved here, along with upgrade plans to get us onto more modern platforms. The old SQL2008/WS2003 system works, but it’s not ideal, and we can’t take advantage of newer technologies and opportunities that Microsoft has released. My thought is to add new content and new sections to the site, including some better quiz/test/assessment ways for people to check their skills and work towards their own goals. If you have ideas, let me know.

It’s been a great year at SQLServerCentral, and I hope you feel the same way. Now, on to 2018 and let’s see where we can go.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

I wrote about shutting down some travel for the foreseeable future. Its been a long couple of years for me. If you look at my speaking schedule, I’ve presented at an average of 20+ events for the last few years. This year was a few less, but I’ve had more travel outside of that. By the end of the year, I’ll have spent 9 weeks outside of the US. While some of that is vacation, it’s a lot of time away from home. In addition to the events, I’ve had other travel for work that doesn’t appear there, as well as some vacation time for volleyball (my daughter competes) and family time.

Lately I’ve been seeing all the tweets and posts about SQL Bits 2018. I won’t be going, which is sad for me. I love the event, it’s my favorite and my wife would love to go with me sometime, maybe in 2018. As I see speakers submitting and the excitement building, it feels like I should just send in a session, but I realize I need to stick with my decision.

Making choices is hard. For a couple years I’ve been saying  I need to travel a bit less, but I haven’t done a good job of slowing down my travel. I find that I’ve done that with other work demands in the past (and personal ones), and I see plenty of other people doing the same thing. This fall I made the commitment that I’d limit travel next year, and I talked to my manager as well. We agreed on a plan, and she’s holding me to the plan, even when I get a bit excited about new events.

My current job allows me some flexibility in how I work, but in past jobs I’ve had similar ways that I could change my job, if I made the effort do so. Your employer will ask a lot of you, and often keep asking. I’ve certainly had some bosses that were unreasonable and demanded too much, but most were willing to work with me. It took me a number of years to learn to push back and say no, as well as learn to make choices among different situations. I find if I don’t make choices, I’ll tend to over commit and under deliver, while being disappointed in myself that I couldn’t make it all work. Or I become a little burned out, spending too much time trying to keep all the balls in the air and running myself ragged.

Balance is important, not only between work and life, but also within work. I find that the more I make choices and stick with them, the better adjusted I am in all of my life. I’m a little sad that I won’t speak at as many events next year, but I’ll pick and choose a few, and hopefully get some things done at work that I’ve been putting off. I’m also hoping that life will seem less chaotic and busy in general, with a little more time to relax and smell the sawdust.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.