Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Career Advice – Play Your Own Game

    I get asked this question fairly often. How do I find time to write so much, work on SQL Server, have a family, a ranch, etc. It seems that people often want to blog as much as me, or speak, or something else.

    It’s natural, I often look at others and think, why can’t I do what he does, or think that I should do what someone does.

    I don’t really want to be like someone, however. I don’t want to live another person’s life. I like my life. What I really would like to do is improve my life in some way.

    It’s easy to get caught up in trying to emulate someone that’s successful, but that’s the wrong thing. Really you want to take a piece of what someone else does and incorporate it into your life. We all look at the world differently and what might seem to work for someone else, or make them successful isn’t what wil work for you.

    Or work in your life.

    I try to stress with the Modern Resume that you want to find what works in your life, what you can handle, and what won’t become another stressor. Learn to do what works for you, in your life, and incorporate that.

    Don’t try to blog like me, or speak as often as I do, or write a book because someone you admire in this business has done it. Do it because it’s something that will work for you, and work at the appropriate time in your life.

    Play your own game.

  • Do You Need a Mentor?

    When I was young, I never thought I did. I was sure that I knew what was best for my career and that I could figure things out by studying more, reading more, and learning more. Probably I had some trusts “issues” somewhere in my past, but I didn’t want to put my career in anyone else’s hands.

    Over the years I’ve doled out advice to a number of people when they’ve asked, and they’ve come back to thank me. I even was in conversation with a few groups this year and two separate people (different people/places) spoke out in the group, crediting me as a mentor to them.

    That surprised me, but it made me stop and think about what I’d asked them and how it had influenced them, based on what they told me. Apparently I had been a bit of a mentor. When someone recently asked me if I’d be a mentor to them, listening and offering advice, I agreed.

    Mentoring

    Those of us with kids try to mentor them. By definition, mentoring is a more senior person (in experience) providing advice or counsel to a more junior person. This has nothing to do with age, and a mentor in one area might be a mentoree in another.

    Looking back I think my career would have been more successful if I had had someone to help guide me, bounce ideas off, and get advice about the directions to take. I’ve had a good career, but I felt like I’ve stumbled in many ways. Fortunately my wife has helped, and my business partner has taught my a lot in the last 6-8 years.

    If you are looking to grow your career, I would look around and think about someone that you trust and have a good relationship with that is a more senior person. It could be your boss, a colleague, or even a neighbor. Ask them if they would help you, and see what they say.

  • Swarms

    First we had agile programming, designed to respond to quickly changing requirements for software development. Now we might have the addition of swarms as a way of getting things done in our jobs.

    One of the predictions that the Gartner Group has for the workplace in the next decade is the introduction of swarms as a more common way for companies to get things done. I think that a swarm is designed to be a rapidly formed, ad hoc group that comes together for a period of time. They are self forming, probably driven by one person that needs help with a problem and  either seeks out colleagues, or perhaps just somehow posts a request for help from people in the company.

    It sounds a lot like an action movie plot where the best soldiers are pulled together for a mission suited to their unique skills. Hopefully it’s more like a Mission Impossible team and not a Mystery Men one, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see more team formed like the one in the latter movie.

    This is really like the crisis team in a company, or a new project team  crossing multiple departments, but organized in a less-formal, and much quicker manner. I do think that more and more we will be called on to do work for people who are not our supervisors as businesses look to be more reactive and responsive to changing requirements.

    I can see us evolving some businesses to having a “guidance counselor” who approves our expense reports, performs periodic reviews, helps us manage our careers, and is available to discuss issues. I think many of us might prefer this to a direct manager that is looking to assign us work. It might be more interesting to go find your own work, or respond to requests from others inside the company.

    Steve Jones

  • T-SQL Tuesday #12 – Why Do You Need a DBA?

    TSQL2sDay150x150 It’s once again time for T-SQL Tuesday, the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter). It’s a monthly blog party, designed to get bloggers to all write on a single topic on the same day. This month we have the party hosted by Paul Randal with his topic of why are DBA skills necessary?

    I enjoy participating, and if you want to host one of the monthly events, please contact Adam and get on the schedule. It’s not a lot of work, and it will be something that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

    Is a DBA Needed?

    I’ve wondered about this at a few jobs. I know when I’ve automated checks and maintenance, gotten a solid DR plan running, and tuned most of the queries that I can, life is pretty easy as a DBA. I’ve often had time to try and learn more about SQL Server, be more pro-active with developers, and even spend a few minutes at the water cooler. After 6-12 months at a few jobs, I’ve often felt like I had things in control, and I could have worked 24 hours a week and had a very stable environment. 

    In fact, I tried to convince one boss of that, offering to take a pay cut and maintain his environment in 3 days a week. My boss didn’t go for it, mostly because the company didn’t want any part time people, but I think I could have saved them some money and been fine with the occasional consulting job.

    Not every environment is like that, but so many consultants walk into jobs where the SQL Server isn’t performing well, and the applications are slow. A crashed server can become a major event, and even cost the company significant revenue from systems not being able to handle the load or being down.

    DBAs are Insurance

    At the base level, a DBA provides some insurance for one of a company’s most valuable assets: it’s data. Many DBAs, even those that don’t know how to tune queries or design databases can implement the basics of the job in two areas:

    • backup/restore
    • security

    Without a doubt there are plenty of people that need to improve these skills, but most of them are better than the average system administrator. A DBA that understands these skills can really save money in a company that has any sort of disaster involving a database. I have seen many Windows administrators relying on their tape backup software and an Open file backup driver, or an agent based backup solution, most of which seem to fail when disaster strikes.

    In terms of security, so often a Windows administrator will grant all read/write rights to people accessing SQL Server. Developers can be even worse, granting db_owner privileges, or even using “sa” in their applications. A DBA can ensure that more granular rights are set up, which reduces the risk of any security issues.

    Even an expensive DBA provides some good insurance for a company that can pay off the first time a database needs a restore.

    DBAs are an Investment

    However someone that has strong skills working with SQL Server can be so much more than insurance. They can be an investment that vastly improves the amount of work that your databases systems can do.

    DBAs can tune your systems. They can ensure that SQL Server is set up properly, and that proper indexing is set up. The time savings can be a huge factor in allowing employees to be more productive and produce more revenue. If you develop pieces of your own software, a DBA is a must to ensure that you have well-written code.

    DBAs can find patterns in your data. I think the DBA is critical to ensuring the intelligence aspect of a BI system. The value of that should not be understated. As we capture more and more information about our businesses, it can be easy to start mis-interpreting or mis-understanding the meaning of that data. A good DBA will understand the business and the data, and help the company to understand what information is contained in the data.

    Not always, but often

    Not every company needs a full time DBA. I wouldn’t expect a small business that runs COTS systems with a system administrator to have one. But many companies, and likely every company that develops software based on a database (either in-house or shrinkwrap), should have DBA skills.  Having someone that understands the database, and can guide its use just prevents so many problems in the future.

    You might not need a full-time DBA, but you most likely do need those DBA skills if you have a SQL Server running in your data center.