Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Prepping for Certification

    Having prepped for, taken, and then failed the MCM exam this year, perhaps I’m not the best person to give you advice for certification preparation. However the MCM is a hard test, I did better than I expected, and I was close. Lots of people haven’t passed it on their first try, including a couple people that work with SQL Server every day to build solutions that must work in the real world. A few of them passed on their second try, though I’m not sure if I’ll take it again anytime soon.

    Recently I ran across this preparation post from Susan Ibach on MSDN. I think it’s good advice and if you follow it, you’ll be prepared for the exam. At least you’ll have a good idea on which general areas the exams focus on since there are %s given for each area. I’ve shown part of the SQL Server exam 70-450:

    cert1

    Note that this section, which includes security for the instance, database, schema, and encryption, is 15%. Since the exam is supposed to be around 50-60 questions, this means that you should get about 10 questions on security. You might get 8, you might get 12, but I wouldn’t expect to get 20.

    I know most of you would like a step by step list of things to do for the exam. However these exams are going to test a wide variety of skills, and since 50 questions isn’t a lot, the exam can’t specify tightly which questions will be asked.

    Sidebar: Personally I’d like to see more specific exams, perhaps as specific as security, replication, SSIS, etc., but lots of people don’t want to certify in all those areas. Plus it changes the profits for MS since they have more exams to administer. We’ll see if this changes in the future.

    As a result you need to study a wide variety of materials. For example, for the security section above, you ought to tackle this in 5 sessions. Build yourself a short list of skills to have in each area. I’ll do section one for you. Here is what I’d go read about in BOL and practice in SSMS.

    If you can explain each of these things to someone else, and perform the skills, you should be fine. I would recommend you blog or write about these, because that helps you to learn and remember this stuff. If you blog about them, ask a friend to look at your blog and see if you have correctly described things.

    Once you think you’re OK with all the sections, not perfect and a guru, but you understand these areas, take the exam. If you want extra practice, get a MeasureUp or other practice test.

    There’s no guarantee and you shouldn’t expect one. Go through the material, explain it back to yourself or someone else and you should be able to pass the test.

  • The Robot DBA

    Manna, a fun, and scary, sci-fi story.

    This is the story of Manna, the manager of a fast food restaurant. It’s a great read, and perhaps a little shocking. Manna is a piece of software, reading sensors, reacting, and letting employees know what to do with a synthesized voice through a set of headphones that the everyone wears in a fast good restaurant. In this tale, Manna evolves into a software system that is spread throughout many industries, essentially displacing managers and many workers at all levels in all industries. With the ability of these different “Manna” variants to communicate and negotiate contracts among themselves, the US devolves into an Orwellian nightmare place to live.

    It’s a science fiction story, but the fears that it evokes are similar to those I’ve heard expressed from many people in the IT field across my two decades in this industry. A friend of mine left IT a decade ago, while working as an Exchange admin for a company with 50,000 mailboxes. He was sure in 5 years his job would be automated and eliminated. I knew a few people that moved out of DBA work in the early 2000s, after Microsoft released SQL Server 7 and 2000, with some marketing messages that the products didn’t require a DBA. A few years ago I heard a few people arguing that PowerPivot would kill most BI development jobs because it was so easy for end users to build their own analysis applications.

    The one constant in all of those stories is that they never came true. I hope that Manna never comes true either, but I’m not worried. I’m very confident that if there’s one truth to all the computer development we do, it’s that we make constant mistakes and there is very little chance that we will be able to automate any significant percentage of IT jobs away.

    We do build better software, and we do allow an administrator to manage many more systems than in the past, but we also seem to constantly eliminate most of the efficiencies in two ways. One is by adding many more systems and applications, and the other is by introducing more complex systems that create new problems that need to be solved.

    The bar for IT knowledge needed is always being raised, but I just can’t see us getting to the point of having automated or robot DBAs running SQL Server in my lifetime.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • An Investment in Knowledge

    Benjamin Franklin was an amazing and insightful person

    “An Investment in Knowledge Pays the Best Interest.” – ~Benjamin Franklin

    Most of us are working to provide for ourselves and our families. We go to a job every day, earning money that we use to pay our bills and, hopefully, enjoy our lives outside of work. Most of us should be saving for retirement as well, for the future when we might not be able to work, or we’ve reached that age where we want to slow down. Given the recent issues in our economies around the globe, perhaps we ought to be saving even more, and not just for retirement. The chances that any of us will be out of work at some point are going up and we might need that savings for that kind of rainy day.

    The quote above is one that I saw years ago, and while I intuitively knew it was right, I’m not sure that it made the impact on me it should have. One of the reasons that it is important to save and invest now for your retirement is that your savings grow, compounding the interest over time to provide amazing growth. I might argue that the investments you make in your knowledge do the same thing.

    If you learn to write better T-SQL now, you will write much better code in the future, making everything you build run a little faster. Learn to eliminate simple  bugs, or avoid SQL Injection-able code, and your work will need less maintenance, or cause less issues. Over time you’re build the reputation, or brand, as someone that is worth hiring. You’ll be worth 50 average employees, and likely never on the market. If you do great work people will be looking to hire you, friends will recommend you, and your former bosses will call you whenever they need someone.

    We can’t all be superstars, or be amazing programmers, but we can all improve our skills and the more we invest in ourselves, the more it’s likely to pay off for us in the future. Just remember that it’s not just hard skills like T-SQL, clustering, etc that matter. Those soft skills of communication, networking, and getting along with others are just as important.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Pop Tarts and Hurricanes

    The second most dold item at Wal-Mart before a hurricane.

    What do people buy most of before a hurricane? Wal-Mart determined that batteries are the number ones sales item before a hurricane, but the second most sold item was surprising: pop-tarts. That’s the type of intelligence that can come from analysts asking the right questions about their customers and then IT delivering systems that can help them get an answer.

    More and more companies are starting to deal with big data. Big data is usually seen as extremely large sets of data. Those data sets  often exceed the capability of what a single database server can handle, and place a strain on existing IT infrastructures, especially when there is an explosion of new datab types. Hadoop is an open source framework that’s designed to deal with large sets of data and help with the processing and analysis of these large data sets.

    Microsoft recently added support for Hadoop to SQL Sever. Granted it’s only in the Parallel Data Warehouse, which is a highly specialized version of SQL Server integrated with specific hardware. However I am sure this will eventually make its way to other editions over time.

    Update: I made a mistake, there is a connector for non PDW SQL Server 2008 R2 instances.

    I don’t know if I would recommend learning Hadoop, but the techniques of processing large sets, and performning analysis on big data is important., Even more important might be the writing of well performing T-SQL code that will be used. I’d recommend you read about ways to write better code, and learn to integrate those skills into your daily work. You don’t always need them, but you often don’t know that when you are writing the code.

    It doesn’t take much more effort to write better code the first time, but it does take more effort to learn to do so. It’s an investment in your career that you ought to be regularly working on to become one of those talented people that is in demand in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts