Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • The Remote Balance

    I still have hope that we will see more and more remote workers in the future. As large companies downsize and choose smaller facilities, and as many new companies start from scratch, we’ll see many of them considering telecommuting to find the best technologists for their openings as well as reduce their infrastructure costs. As noted in the book, Remote: “Today, the new paradigm is move work to the workers, rather than workers to the workplace.”

    I don’t know if we’ll ever get the majority of people working remotely from offices or at home, but I do know that I see more and more people able to get work done outside of a traditional office. I see people checking email and responding to trouble tickets in all sorts of situations, and with all sorts of jobs. I suspect that businesspeople continue to do this more and more as devices and software expand to allow it.

    I saw that quote from Remote in a blog from Scott Hanselman where he also commented on that idea, but noted that we need to strive for some balance. It is great that you can fix a problem at your kid’s soccer game or dance recital, but it’s also important that you attend and enjoy those events.

    Like most tools, our remote access can be good or bad. If you check too often, become tethered to devices, and ignore the real world, that’s bad. However if you leave the office early, get to the game, and get some work done before the action starts, that’s good. Just don’t forget to prioritize the important stuff, which is usually not work. It’s the event you’re attending.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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  • Why Should You Network?

    This editorial was originally published on August 17, 2009. It is being re-run for the President’s Day holiday.

    Why should you network? I’m speaking about interpersonal networking, not the bits and bytes in the ether kind 🙂

    It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been thinking about a lot since reading Andy Warren’s posts on the subject. He thought it was interesting enough to engage Don Gabor for his business and spend a little money to learn how to do it better. After having a few sessions, Andy thought it was helpful enough to get a pre-conference session at PASS on this topic. It’s a short pre-con, 2 hours, and won’t interfere with anything else you’ve booked. It’s an additional $60, but I’ve paid my fee (it’s a business expense) and will be there.

    Whether or not you attend the session (it’s limited in size), I think there is value in learning to network better. Andy has reviewed a few books, and I’m sure I’ll have some quick techniques to give you after PASS, or even during it. If you see me during the conference, please don’t hesitate to come up and say hello to me. It’s always great to meet new people.

    Back to me question: why network? I’ll give you a few examples in my life. I involuntarily networked myself into this field. When I was in graduate school searching for a job, I saw an internship at the power company. There were a few positions, but one of them was in the EE department, slightly out of my field. The guy in charge, however, was an alum of the University of Virginia, and I applied, and he gave me the job because we were fellow graduates. I had asked him a few months later and he said I got preference for that reason.

    In 4 other cases later in my career, I’ve heard about consulting jobs in various places in the US. I haven’t been interested in any of them, but I have passed them along to friends that I’ve gotten to know over the years from SQLServerCentral. These were people that had taken the time to say hi to me at some event and then correspond with me a little. Many of them were authors, and as I got to know their skills, I became comfortable with recommending them for work. It didn’t benefit me other than a little goodwill and the feeling of helping others.

    I have heard about similar situations all the time, where people have built a friendship, or some other bond, and then referred work or helped someone get a job. As much as it may upset technical people, it’s still often who you know that matters much more than your technical skills. Networking is a great way to grow your career by knowing more people.

    Steve Jones

    PS, I don’t get anything from recommending Don’s session at PASS,  but I’ve already paid my fee to go, and since Andy Warren recommended it, I’ll do the same. I trust his advice. And if you don’t go, feel free to ask me anytime during the week about it.

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  • Powershell in a Month Day 17 – Security Alert

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Security. It’s important, and I was thinking this chapter would show us more about changing security. Instead, this chapter is really an outline and discussion of what security method are built into the PoSh shell. The chapter first emphasizes that the PoSh environment doesn’t bestow and special rights or abilities to the executor. The commands just execute, or fail to execute, base do on the rights you have in windows already. I can see that as some of the commands I run at times fail when I haven’t run the shell as an administrator.

    From there the chapter talks about the different execution policies, which I haven’t thought much about. I end up typically changing the execution policy on each VM initially so I can run scripts to Unrestricted. I know that isn’t recommended, but I typically need things to just work.
    I also hadn’t realized that I could set this in a GUI in Windows. That’s good to know, and I suspect, it’s another example of where Windows is implementing PoSh commands under the hood of the GUI. It would be nice to see a Trace for PoSh to watch commands come through GUI actions.
    The chapter finisheds by talking about the digital signing of scripts, how it works, and what you need to do. I haven’t messed with this and it’s not a part of the lab, but it’s something I’d probably do in a large organization, or even any organzation to be sure that hte code that’s being automated and run is actually the code that has been tested.
    Overall, a short chapter. Slightly informative, and definitely an easy day.

  • Powershell in a Month Day 16 – Working with many objects

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    One of the great powers of T-SQL is that we can owrk with many rows at once. We use a query to tell the server what we want done to a group of objects, and then the query executes against every row that matches the filters. It’s this power that makes SQL much more efficient than the RBAR method of moving through a cursor structure. This chapter introduces the ways in which we do that with Powershell.

    The first part of the chapter is about batch commandlets, using things like Stop-Process receiving a pipeline of objects from something like Get-Process. I like their favorite example, which I’ve yet to run. I need to do this in a VM and see what happens.
    Get-Process | Stop-Process
    That’s an easy concept for me, and I see how valuable this is. However not all of the cmdlets we call will handle batches. The next part of the chapter examines WMI and the Invoke-WmiMethod call, which can take a series of objects as well. I somewhat dread the idea of needing to use this method, or worse, having to call a series of methods in which I have to pass in all the parameters. It’s good to know that I need the $null parameter for those parameters I don’t want to deal with, but it’s an ugly syntax. It’s handy to know this is an option, but I think I’ll be doing MSDN research for those times that I need to work with these methods.
    The next part of the chapter looks at the ForEach-Object syntax. I’ve seen this in scripts, and I could guess what i does, but this starts to make sense now and I can more easily decode the scripts when I see them. Along with the $_ marker to represent an object, the whole structure of PoSh is becoming easier to read.
    The chapter isn’t long and and starts to spend time comparing the various methods of enumeration. That’s helpful. Seeing how the same end result can be achieved in different ways is very handy. The lab was easy, though I had to skip the WMi stuff as I was unwired at the time that I went through this chapter. However I had an idea of what to do, just no way to look up the WMI classes.