Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Becoming a Better DBA

    One of the things that I try to advocate for is that more of you actively manage your careers and find ways to improve your skills. I want you to be more impressive and find an amazing job for you. Not my job, because I have the best job in the world, but I hope you find a job that you love as much as I love mine.

    It does take effort, work, and focus. It’s something else to manage in life. I certainly don’t want you to only care about work. After all, we work to live, not live to work.

    That being said, I think you can build the habit of regular career improvement. For those of you that work as DBAs, I found this list of things that help improve your productivity. The first few items are practical having a routine of things to check and a way to monitor your systems. Those are core skills and a base from which to build. I might stress backups, restores and DR as well, since the main thing is that you can protect and recover data if everything else falls apart.

    However, the last few items are less tangible. How do you keep up, explore, and try things? In what area or topic should you start? What’s important? I find many people struggle with these less directed pieces of advice. If I want to keep up, what do I do? If I want to experiment or ask about something, what is the most efficient way to do this?

    There’s advice in the article, but here’s my main thought. Don’t try to be efficient or perfect. Just pick the thing that’s in front of you. Pick something that someone asked you about and you didn’t know. Or maybe the thing that looked interesting? Just move forward.

    Most of the work we do to improve ourselves isn’t tightly focused at first. It’s just a step forward and it’s not a permanent step. If you decide to start learning about something such as Availability Groups and then realize you don’t like this area or it isn’t important, just switch to something else. Your time isn’t wasted because even if you don’t use that skill, you learned about learning something. And you learned something about yourself and what you enjoy. Move on and try something else.

    For me, I started SQL Server Central. but I liked newsletters similar to the one I send out each week because they gave me something to learn about. I used to troll forums at various places and see the “active threads“. I’d try to answer random questions, even if I didn’t post the answers. I started to blog and write, mostly to see if I could explain things back in a way that made sense. It became a career, but before that it was a way to impress hiring managers. It also forced me to learn more about little topics and all of that knowledge helped me to be more effective at my job.

    Taking a little time every week to learn something, work on your career, and document it (hopefully as a #SQLNewBlogger). It is a good way to improve your skills and also showcase them for the next person that hires (or promotes) you. Hopefully into a position that you desire and choose.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Goal Progress for May 2022

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2022.

    A few days late, and I missed April, but I’m trying to get back on track for May.

    It’s been a hectic travel time the last couple months. April was mostly my second job as a coach and May was mostly work. June is a mix, and the in and out of a routine can be a challenge. I made a little progress, but the large amount of things I’m doing impact my ability to make much progress outside of work.

    Most of the things that I have done were in conjunction with things related to work. The limited progress is mostly around the limited opportunities to find a common item with work and goals, but I did manage a touch.

    I’m raising the goal slightly as I made progress despite the schedule.

    Grade: B-

    Here are the goals:

    Work

    • DP-900 – Passed
    • DP-300
      – Stated studying, practice tests around 80% correct, need to schedule
    • Demo with SQL Server – 20% – dev db set up, started on pipeline
    • Demo with PostgreSQL – 20% – Dev db set up
    • Demo with MySQL – 0%
    • Feedback book – 100% – HIGHLY Recommended
    • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy – 40%

    Personal

    I made a slight alteration here. I didn’t try to hook up to Google Sheets, but instead pasted in some data and started to try and get this moving.

    • Link Google Sheets to Power BI – 0%
    • Create Report – 40%  – I have a report working for some of my metrics.
    • Create Dashboard – 20%  – A basic dashboard up, but need to decide on what to show here.
    • Get people using it – 0%

    Community

    • Support the Colorado groups by speaking twice and helping get one event set up
      – 40%
      • CO Springs event set up
      • Meeting with Denver SQL about an event
    • Speak at 3 other user groups outside of Colorado – 66%
      • Spoke at DBA Fundamentals group
      • Spoke at Toronto SSUG
    • Support SQL Saturdays – Help get 10 events run in 2022
      • 6 scheduled or run in , 2 about to go live,  2-3 more close
    • Volunteer 4 days with Habitat – 0 days
      • Not happy about this. Now with a surgery, this will be delayed for a few months.

  • Republish: It’s Not Yours

    I’m still at Techorama.

    Check out It’s Not Yours from the past. For some reason I didn’t get it on this blog, so here it is:

    It’s Not Yours

    For most of my career, I’ve felt a tie to the systems I’ve managed or the code I’ve written. I’ve often said that a part of the code was mine, because it was something I’d written. Having some ownership of your work has often meant more pride in ensuring things are well implemented. The same thing goes for administering databases. When an employee feels personally responsible and accountable for  the database and its contents, usually they do a better job.

    Most of us know that the systems we manage and the data they contain aren’t really “ours”, no matter how we might refer to them in conversation. We know that ultimately the data, applications, and hardware belong to our employers. Or, we should know that.

    Apparently not everyone does. A contractor just pleaded guilty to stealing classified information from the US National Security Agency, about 50GB worth of data. This isn’t a case of spying or malicious intent. Instead, the report is that the employee was a hoarder, just keeping copies of data for some unknown reason. Hopefully that’s true.

    Many of us will have copies of data that we use for different purposes. We might be building software, or testing queries, or some other task that requires data. We might want to conduct more in depth analysis in our spare time. Those are all positive goals, but none of them mean that we should have copies of data without authorization. We don’t own the data, and we should always be sure if we are moving data to other systems, that those systems are secure and someone else has approved the action.

    This becomes more important all the time. We have enough issues with data security and keeping our information away from hackers. We make plenty of mistakes with configuration in authorized development and test systems. There’s no reason to add to the issues by treating data as our own personal asset, no matter how good your intentions.

    Steve Jones

  • The Future of Certifications

    Hacker News is a forum for experienced developers. While I think plenty of beginners lurk there, the discussions seem to be dominated by those who have worked in the technology or software industries for years. I saw an interesting article that noted Hacker News doesn’t seem to discuss certifications and backed up the claim with some search results that show few results for various terms.

    I think that many experienced people working in technology are wary of certifications. With a little practical experience, one quickly realizes how little certifications actually do to prove you know how to work with a platform, or with code. Most companies that hire someone with a certification will need to allocate some time to training them how to work on their systems. To be fair, this is the case with a college degree as well.

    The article goes on to talk a little on how colleges ought to be separating out a “degree” from more concentrated or focused evaluations of skills. I agree, though arguably this reduces the brand (and revenue) of many institutions. My view would be that many people don’t need the two year degree. Those that do will come back and get it, or take additional classes to learn more.

    I do believe that studying for and passing a certification forces someone to learn a bit about the technology area. It also helps the student decide if it’s a subject in which they have an interest. It doesn’t prove they have knowledge, but it does show some work in a particular area. I think certifications can be good for many people as my studies this year have definitely helped me learn a bit more about different areas of Azure that I knew little about. I’m not an expert by any stretch, but I have some idea of concepts and how to go about learning more.

    My view is that beginners are very different from experienced people. We ought to understand that all of us are beginners in some technology area and certifications are a good way to focus effort and study in those areas. I would prefer that vendors not only have a path to more difficult and practical certifications but also that they lower the cost. I’d even like to see a second chance at exams given at 1/2 or 1/4 price. That would encourage more people to take a chance on an exam and not worry about the cost so much. This also might reduce some of the brain dumps and other cheats if someone isn’t overly stressed about the cost of exams.

    I’d actually like to see exams focused on very tight areas, like only T-SQL DML or T-SQL DDL, with actual code being written and tested, not multiple-choice questions. This is the type of program that might even encourage employers to regularly test their candidates before hiring, or even encourage more employees to cross-train into new technologies.

    There is a shortage of talent, often in new areas that vendors are selling products and services. Demand that vendors also provide training and focused exams that are based on the current versions at low costs. We can make this cheaper and easier to do. We’ve done that with most parts of technology services, why not exams and certifications?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.