Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Investing in Speed

    While most of us might not want to start our own company (or maybe we do), we can learn a few things from those that do. Building something new, being efficient, effective, and quick are skills needed when starting a company. I’ve read a lot about how companies are built and entrepreneurs work. Lately I ran across some advice from Daniel Gross, the founder of Pioneer, a former partner at Y-Combinator (from David Perell).

    Many of us are financially careful. We often are careful with how and where we spend money at home. I find lots of tech professionals frugal at work as well, often being careful with their budgets, or even with the requests they make of managers. That being said, here is a great quote:

    “Overbearing frugality prevented me from spending any money, which creates inefficiencies. Spend like a king on speed, like a pauper on everything else. Faster computer? Go. Faster Internet? Go. Better sleep? Go. Expensive dinner? Stop. Expensive dinner to close a candidate? Go. If you can, use your capital to move faster. Your competitor is taking the shorter flight. Book it.”

    Often I see companies get caught up spending or not spending based on some ideas that don’t have anything to do with efficiency. They don’t invest in things that improve the business, but invest in things they like, or avoid things they don’t like. I see this with choices as well, where a professional or manager may want to change a tool/platform/etc. because they like one over the other. Often without any good fundamental reason.

    Spending money isn’t bad if you are investing in driving your business forward. Learn to make that distinction and don’t be afraid of making good investments. It’s fine to indulge in anything, but in moderation. That might be the key to success for many hings in life.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • What does the Future DBA Do?

    The database administrator (DBA) role has always been a strange one to many organizations. Some companies embrace the role, some don’t. Some hire DBAs, some expect others to handle those duties. The others could be sysadmins for other systems or developers, or maybe everyone might just assume someone else is handling backups, index maintenance, and more. Often those latter companies will have issues at some point when they need to recover a system or performance is extremely poor.

    As cloud computing has become more popular, there have been quite a few pieces about how the DBAs job is changing. Often the response to these items is one of two things. Either people agree and talk about a completely new way they will need to work and new skills they must acquire, or they are sure nothing will really change.

    I think both things are true. I’m not sure that if you are a DBA now that your work in your current role will change that much. Sure, the company might add some new tasks, new resources, ask you to learn now things but often if your company hasn’t embraced a lot of change, your job isn’t changing. Even if your company adopts some cloud computing.

    I just wonder if this is your last job. I hope this is mine, but for many people, they can expect a new employer at some point. If that is likely, then are you positioned for your next job?

    I ran across a piece on how the DBA job might change, and I think there are things to think about here. There are five items to look at, and all of them relate to the cloud’s influence on DBAs. While I don’t know that most, or even lots, of companies will adopt the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) or have their DBs be a utilty in the PaaS sense, I do think DBAs should strive to make the database a utility for both ops staff and developers. There is a surprising amount of effort here, and I do hope things like the Spawn project from Redgate change the way we work with databases in the future.

    I do think that if you need to seek a new employer, and new opportunities, your general skills will matter. Being an amazing T-SQL guru or incredible AG admin might be highly valued in your current role, but often hiring managers might want to be sure you know something about a wide variety of things, from AI/ML to Power BI to working in the cloud. Your ability to learn, collaborate, and discuss intelligently different aspects of database work will be important.

    If you think you might need another job, think about acquiring the skills for your next job today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • TSQL for Beginners–#RGCommunityCircle

    As a part of the Redgate Community Circle, giving back in this strange time, each of the advocates for Redgate is teaching a free course. We’re doing this live each week, according to this schedule:

    I decided to watch a class of each of the others’ work and write about it. This post looks at the first class from Kendra Little on basic T-SQL.

    Basic T-SQL

    I know a lot of T-SQL, but I also don’t know a lot. I’m good, maybe above average, but not a great query writer. I learn all the time from others, and often find something interesting in basic presentations. I’m also always looking to see how others teach basic topics to improve my own skills.

    Kendra has done an interesting thing with putting her course on GitHub. That’s a great idea, though for mine, I am following articles on SQLServerCentral. Having a good outline and resources for students is a good idea, and everyone ought to be able to use a VCS, including GitHub, so I like putting pages here and code in a repo.

    Why is that good? This is what I did to start following Kendra’s class:

    2020-05-01 10_15_26-cmd

    Now I can open the first script in ADS. On top of seeing how Kendra teaches, I get to practice some ADS stuff.

    2020-05-01 10_17_28-1_SelectAndAlias_Demo.sql - disconnected - TSQLBeginners - Azure Data Studio

    I like the doorstop at the end, and I’ll have to think about that for my demo scripts. I’ve accidentally run the entire script too many times.

    Kendra walks through a number of query concepts with a series of basic SELECT statements, including an emoji for a column alias. I’m glad she lets you know which items are not recommended.

    The first course is helping you understand some of the ways in which you can get data from tables. You do need to have a slight understanding of what a table is, but Kendra helps you learn some of the strange ways that you can put together a statement. There is a lot to cover, but this should help someone that wants to learn some basics get started.

    There is also homework, included as part of the scripts in the course. The questions are at the bottom, and called out. A good way to get you to practice. I should do this for my work in places as well.

    2020-05-01 11_09_20-1_SelectAndAlias_Demo.sql - Plato_SQL2017.sandbox (Integrated) - TSQLBeginners -

    Pass this course along to someone that needs to get better at T-SQL. It’s not too fast or hard, and will let them be sure they have a grounding in good ways to write queries.

  • Goal Progress–Apr 2020

    Time for my monthly progess report on goals. I set goals and had an update last month. This month, I’ve had a reminder for 4 days that says “work on goals” on my desktop. The reason it says 4 days is that I dismissed it last week. Otherwise it would say 11 days.

    Reading

    I haven’t tackled the non fiction, non technical book other than a few pages. However I did go through another chapter in the Pro Power BI Desktop book. Most of the intermediate chapters I skimmed through last month or early this month were based on loading data from different sources. Those are all variations on a theme, so I didn’t do much more than skim.

    Chapter 7, however, on transforming data, was more interesting. This is where I can use some skills, and where I learned how to do somethings like change the locale interpretation for data. Things I need to do since I work with UK data at times and I’m a US date person. I practiced a few things so I did learn a bit.

    Projects

    No specific progress, but I did start working on a live stairway class, going through DAX stuff, which will help me here.

    Report

    Overall, I’m failing at these goals, but coping with life.

    I’ll give myself a D for now.