Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • T-SQL Tuesday #146–Changing Preconceptions

    tsqltuesdayIt’s the start of a new year, and the first T-SQL Tuesday is from Andy Yun. I’ve known Andy a long time and this is his third time hosting with a creative prompt for us all to consider.

    I really like this one as it could be taken as a technical or a non-technical prompt. What did you think was one way and you learned it was another way. Always good to stop and double check that your view is actually representing what you think.

    We all do this in our views of life as well as work, and it can be hard to change what or how we think. This is especially true for many of my customers, as I find them wanting to adopt DevOps, but not really wanting to change.

    I’ll tackle this one in a couple ways, one technical and one non-technical.

    Separate Accounts for Each Instance

    For a long time, I always used separate domain accounts for each SQL Server service. Even in a large environment, with hundreds of instances, I did the work (or have junior DBAs do it) to ensure that each service was account separated. This was important because I’ve had change passwords and other issues break services in the past. None of the incidents seemed worth saving a bit of time to set up separate accounts.

    Over time, and as SQL Server evolved, Group Managed Service Accounts came into being. I resisted using these at first, but over time I’ve realized that these are valuable and provide security as well as ease of administration. If I went back to managing servers, even single ones, I’d likely look to ensure that gMSA was the standard.

    Take Feedback as An Opportunity

    I’ve struggled with having someone criticize me for my work. I’ve even struggled when they suggest something else, bristling at the idea that I wasn’t doing something well. Often I was successful and doing something well, but there might be a better way.

    Across time, and age, I’ve learned to appreciate other points of view and not become defensive to feedback. Instead, I’ve started to look at other views as a chance to learn or grow, or even just try something. I can still reject the advice or suggestion, but I ought to consider it.

    I’ve started to adopt the “strong opinions, loosely held” philosophy at work.

    Note, I’m trying to do this in my personal life, but I still very much suck at this.

  • What Were Your 2021 Wins

    LinkedIn sent me a prompt just before Christmas that asked me to write a post on my 2021 wins, using the #2021wins hashtag. I thought it was a neat idea, and I blogged on this topic before I left for my final vacation. I primarily had work items in there, though a couple of work-related things. To me, while 2021 was disappointing in some ways, it was still a great year for me in many ways, and I’ve tried to keep that in mind. Not focus on things that didn’t go well but those that did.

    It’s the first week of the new year, and many of you are likely starting to look forward at work and in your career. You might have made resolutions, or maybe you are just re-focusing after the holidays. Either way, on this Friday I’d like you to think back to last year, focusing on how your career might have changed throughout the second year of the COVID pandemic.

    What was a career win for you in 2021?

    That’s the question. It could be a change that you made, a skill you learned, a project you completed, maybe an award. Perhaps it was something that happened and you just experienced. Maybe an event or talk that inspired you or changed the outlook on something.

    I’d like to think that all of you had at least one good thing happen in your career last year. Take a minute and share in your win and congratulate others for theirs.

    Steve Jones

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

  • A Few #2021Wins

    It’s the end of the year. I’m on vacation, celebrating time with family now, but I wanted to write this post. I got a prompt from LinkedIn last week that said this:

    2021-12-22 14_21_39-Inbox - way0utwest@hotmail.com - Outlook

    I’m going to add this to an editorial and see what people might write next week, but for now, a few wins from me.

    Health – Given the state of the world and a pandemic, I think it’s a win that everyone in my family remained healthy in 2021.

    Travel – Despite the pandemic, I got to visit a new country, Belgium, and it was an amazing trip. Looking forward to going back.

    SQL Saturday – I convinced Andy Warren to run a SQL Saturday in Orlando, and it was the only in-person SQL Saturday in 2021. Easy to be disappointed there weren’t more, but happy there was one.

    Volleyball – A successful season, where we persevered and found ways to keep kids occupied. My team finished ahead of where we expected, winning 8 tournaments, getting into the top 30 in 3 national tournaments, and having extremely happy kids that wanted us to coach them again.

    Guitar – I felt like I improved a lot of skills here, really all through the pandemic, but as I’ve learned a few things, it was neat to hear my wife or kids recognize a song and sing along, even though I hadn’t told them what it was.

    Happy New Year!

  • Goal Progress in December 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    The last review of the year. I need to set new goals, but I’ll actually do that the first week of the year, taking a little time next week to think.

    2021 Grade: C+

    I don’t think I did OK here with the year of goals, but I learned a few things about setting goals and how to tackle them for next year. That will inform my view of the future.

    This year wasn’t supposed to be as busy. With no real end to the pandemic in sight, I thought I’d be home more often, with a little more time to work on myself, but that was a mistake. I got quite busy, and I found myself spending more time away from deep technical topics.

    Not a bad thing, but it affected my goals. As usual, reading is easier for me than working on technical problems, and that aligns with a lot of what I do for work.

    Here is where I finished in the various areas:

    Reading

    I’ve been working through a few books around the fiction that captivates me. I like the feedback book, but I find myself stopping and thinking often. It’s going slower than expected. The Project to Product was good, making me rethink how I would tackle software in a company.

    The GE one was personally interesting as I wanted to work there when I was in university. It’s almost more of a history book, but it confirms what I thought. A dysfunctional place to work that played with finance more than they were amazing business people. They were good business people, but not the star it appeared from the outside.

    The PoSh book was a bit of a project, but I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one.

    Here’s the current progress:

    Technical Skills

    Here are the items I was aiming to work on this year:

    • Certification –  AZ-900 – 0% (2 modules)
    • Certification – DP-900 – 50% (14 modules)
      • 50% of this is studying the general material
      • 20% is the focused review
      • 30% the test
    • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25 (2021 puzzles 4)
    • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25
    • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25

    Projects

    My projects were in these areas.

    • Support Local Events (or whatever the data platform one day event thing is)
      • Added 3 events manually in 2021
      • Managed to get SQL Saturday set up as an independent charity, a US 501.c.3 corp
      • 2 SQL Saturday events in 2021 (1 in-person, 1 virtual)
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
      • Spoke at 2 groups. The third hasn’t had meetings.
      • I did speak at 4 remote user groups
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
      • Semi-failure. There wasn’t much interest in either, but I did get my session to the user group to be hybrid, and some people appreciated this.
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – Didn’t complete this, but it’s working for kids and parents to see some stats.