Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • The Maintenance Poll

    What’s your maintenance window like when you repair your systems?

    Part of working in Information Technology is working during off hours. In one company we had a standing maintenance window every Friday night. It was annoying for the family, but it did build a nice bond among the production staff during our many Friday night dinners together. Another company allowed maintenance only from midnight Saturday to 6am Sunday, once a quarter. Those restrictions, while annoying, certainly taught us to prepare and test everything in advance.

    The systems we build and support are often in use during the business day by our companies and clients. That usually means that patches or changes to the applications take place in off hours, and that means the IT staff is used to working at night and on weekends to make changes. This Friday I’m wondering what that means for the SQL Server community.

    What type of maintenance windows do you typically operate under?

    Do you have regular maintenance scheduled? When you patch systems or make changes, how does that impact your schedule during the week? Do you get any comp time or flexible scheduling to accommodate patches?

    It’s interesting right now with SQLServeCentral. Since most of the staff at Red Gate operates on GMT and most of the audience is in one of the US timezones, it’s preferable for changes to the systems to be made early in the morning in Cambridge. An 9-10am change window occurs at 4am EST/1am PST, and a relatively small amount of our audience is affected. These changes also mean that there are plenty of people in the office to respond if there are issues.

    In most companies I’ve worked in, we had limited change windows, and restrictions at different times of the year, but overall we had regular maintenance scheduled and available to allow us to maintain our systems and allow staff to plan for work during off-hours, with some type of flexible time for employees stuck working after hours. Let us know today if that’s the case at your job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Attracting Talent

    Red Gate Software
    Red Gate is hiring

    Finding good employees is hard. If you read the blogs and tweets from people trying to interview developers or DBAs, it seems there’s no shortage of unqualified candidates looking for jobs every day. The answers given to fairly simple questions, the lack of knowledge in areas list on the job description, and the inability to back up the words written on resumes are jaw-dropping. It’s a problem that seems to have no solution in sight, which is distressing.

    When a company needs help, what can they do? Hopefully they’re a good company, one where people want to work. If that’s the case, then be real, be honest, and show employees that you are a place people want to work. My own employer, Red Gate Software, made a great video for a UX specialist. It almost makes me want to apply for that job. Unfortunately I’m much better at breaking visually appealing things than designing them.

    The best way to find good employees is really through networking and word of mouth. Employees tend to know who can do a good job, and it’s not often I find someone looking to recommend an incompetent individual to help share the load. Empoyees know that recommending a slacker is likely to result in more work for them, not less. This might help you build better teams, but if your culture stinks, you might get no recommendations at all.

    Steve Jones

    PS – We are hiring a few people at Red Gate. It’s a great company, and if you want to live in Cambridge, apply for one of the positions.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Why Support WIT

    First, only support Women in Technology if you want to. It’s an idea that appeals to some, but not to everyone and if it’s not your cause, that’s fine. I don’t think less of you for not supporting the cause, but I would if you bash it. There’s no reason to do that.

    What is WIT? Karen Lopez has a great writeup, and one I agree with. We want to make sure people that want to get into technology can, and not feel that their interest in the field is “wrong”.

    This is Why I #WIT …And Why You Should, Too.

  • Data Gravity

    gravity
    Does data have gravity? And will it affect DBAs’ jobs?

    Many of us have worked with distributed applications at this point in our careers, with different parts of the application located on different physical servers. Some of us might have worked with applications that actually have different servers in different locations, potentially even different countries. That can be challenging, dealing with different time zones, different collations and regional settings on servers and more.

    While many of us are not looking to implement cloud computing now, we may do so in the future, but not for simple cost reasons. There’s a piece about data gravity in the cloud, and how the law can drive the location of data in some cases. Just as many companies that wanted to offer gambling services moved to countries with fewer laws about that business, I would expect that we see some companies moving pieces and parts of their data to other countries to take advantage of more lax or lenient privacy or other laws in the future.

    Most companies won’t bother trying to avoid laws like this right now, but at some point in the future, the cost of moving an application to another country might be tiny. We constantly build better tools for distributed development, deployment, and management, and whether it’s a cloud infrastructure, or just a rented VM, we may find that it becomes worthwhile in some cases to move data, not just for cost reasons, but potentially to reduce the costs of compliance with local laws.

    It’s hard to know whether compliance with the law will ever significantly affect the work a DBA does, but I certainly expect that we will have distributed applications with their various components more widely distributed to challenge us in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.