Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • How Do You Find a DBA?

    This editorial was originally published on May 11, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    You’d think it would be easy, but I saw this post about looking for a DBA and I can certainly appreciate the problem. I’ve been in the situation of looking for someone to hire and getting hundreds of resumes for a position. In that case, I hate to say it, but I’ve sometimes only looked at the first 40 or 50 resumes I receive, sending the rest to a circular file. That’s not the way to find the “best” person for the job, whatever that means, but it certainly means that the early bird has a chance at the worm.

    But where is a good place to look? That really depends on where DBAs go to look for jobs, so where do you look?

    In the past, when I was looking for a job, I used Monster and Dice, getting slightly different results from each. There were a few other sites I tried, but I’m not sure that any of these other sites do a better job of listing jobs. Since you need to have a lot of jobs and traffic to be useful, the larger the site the better. Also it seems that many consulting companies or recruiters post jobs to multiple sites (usually Monster and Dice), so I’m not sure you can find more jobs on any one site over another.

    Today, however, I think I’d take a different approach to looking for a job, using the people I know, or my network, to see what’s available. If I were hiring someone, I think I’d do the same thing. I posted in the thread that using your local user group, the people you know, contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. to post the job and let those people pre-filter for you, might be the best solution.

    Hiring someone and finding a good employee is a hit and miss affair. I’m sure most people wish they had a better process, and a better way to evaluate someone’s skills. I think by looking for recommendations from people, people that you will see again, you have a better chance of finding someone that fits the position.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

    The podcast feeds are available atsqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

    You can also follow Steve Jones on Twitter:

    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.

  • Powershell in a Month – Day 6 The Pipeline

    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.

    Day 6. This is where I found the idea of Powershell getting interested. I used pipes extensively back in my Unix and DOS days, and have heard that these are important in powershell.

    The pipeline (|) essentially takes the output of the left command and sends it to the right. The first examples are with exporting data, such as:

    Get-Service | Export-CSV services.csv

    This command would run the Get-Service command to get a list of services, then send that output to the Export-CSV command, which would create a file, format the data in CSV format, and send all the data from the Get-Service command into the file. Simple, easy and it makes sense. There are also Export-CliXML, -FormatData, etc. commands. On my system I even have an Export-VM  command for Hyper-V. I can start to see possibilities.

    This is different from the redirector (>), which is essentially running the pipe to Out-File, a command to create a file. There are other Out-* commands that send data other places, like printers, the screen, etc. Why does it matter that you have these commands? Well, mainly because you might want to alter some parameters, like display width, encoding, etc. Having a real command build allows for parameters, and control, and thus, customization.

    Powershell is all about customization, and being able to repeat that process. This chapter gives the basics of controlling your flow out output, including to other commands. For example, one of the things the chapter has you do is

    Get-Process -name Notepad | Stop-Process

    A fancy way to kill a process. It does warn you not to forget the -name parameter, as that would be bad. I was tempted to try it on a VM, but I know what will happen, so I didn’t bother. For commands that might cause problems, the chapter goes over the -confirm and -whatif parameters, which, respectively, ask you questions to confirm your actions, and show you the action without performing it. The lab for the chapter has you dig into other parameters, like appending to files (noclobber) using the default regional settings (useculture) and changing the delimiter for export. I actually found these lab exercises to be slightly challenging, but also handy. I got to use the help system and proved to myself a bit that I’m learning how to use PoSh.

    Overall, no great leaps in knowledge here, but I find myself gaining some confidence that I understand how PoSh works, how to manipulate the environment a bit, and I can see the possibilities of using the pipeline to string commands together and manage more than a simple stream of output data.

    The next chapter looks at more involved strings of commands, and I’m looking forward to that one.

  • The Challenge of Time Off

    I’ve been working full time for most of my life. Since I was 16, I’ve rarely worked less than full time, and often worked substantially more. There are times I’ve had two or three jobs, though fortunately I think those days are behind me. I have a great job now, perhaps the best job in the world, and I get a generous vacation allowance. However I do struggle to take time off some years. That’s my issue, and I’m working on trying to make sure I get away from work more. I appreciate the time off, but I also enjoy my job and the interactions I have with the community.

    However not everyone is in the same situation. There are plenty of people out there that get limited vacation, little support for taking time off from employers. There are those consultants that are self-employed and struggle with taking time off when it means they aren’t paid for that day. I’ve been in all of those situations, and here’s my advice.

    If you don’t think you get enough time off, then look for another job. The same thing applies if your boss doesn’t want to allow you to take the time off you are allotted. There are bad managers out there, and companies that look to take advantage of their employees. You can live with it, you can complain, or you can move on. The choice is up to you, but that’s what I’d do.

    I realize it’s not easy to just get a new job, but you can make a plan and move on. My wife and I did that, though it did take years. Life is short, but hopefully still lasts for many years. Making plans across years is the way to improve your situation over time, though you should still work to appreciate and enjoy the journey along the way.

    If you’re a consultant, the only thing I can say is that you need to budget. You need to limit your expenses and plan for vacation. The amount you bill may be out of your control, but you should have some idea of a range and you your expenses, your living standard, should be based on a number that allows you to take some time off each year. If it doesn’t, you can improve your skills and bill more, or find ways to reduce your expenses.

    I know this can be tough advice, but ultimately you are responsible for your life. You may be dealt a bad situation, but it is up to you to make the best of it, and learn to live within your means if you want to avoid the stress of overwork.

    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 ( 22.7MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 26.2MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 5.3MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

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

  • Powershell in a Month– Day 4 and 5 – Providers

    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.

    Day 4, and 5. This wasn’t a long chapter, but it came right around travel and vacation, and as a result, I ended up taking about 2 hours across multiple days. Mostly because I had to re-read things and re-type them. As a result, I’m marking this as two days. Plus, this will now line up the chapters.

    Providers are the “drivers”, I guess for Powershell. They allow you to interact with various systems through the Powershell commands. Another way of putting it is that they take some item and make it look like a file system. This means you can navigate the registry (with the registry provider) like your disk with CD, DIR, etc. It’s also why you can move through SQL Server in a folder-like hierarchy.

    This was a short chapter, and I’m not sure why it took so long, but I moved slow going through the exercises to creates files and folders, learning to use the New-Item or Set-Location commands instead of the mkdir or cd ones.  I did find this interesting.

    The lab exercises were easy, and once I could focus, I got through them quickly.

    The next chapter is pipelines, which is where I think the power of PowerShell starts to come through.