Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Fundamentals

    Volleyball season is approaching. Practice started last week for the team that I’m coaching this year, and I’m excited. I look forward to teaching and competing with a new group of athletes each year. I’ll also look forward to a more regular schedule and a bit less traveling for a few months.

    In preparation for this season, I’ve been doing some learning, some reading and watching, trying to improve my abilities, something I’ve done for a few years. One of the books I completed recently was one on John Wooden and called Wooden: A Coaches Life. This was a look at his life, as player and coach, with some of the descriptions and principles that embodied his work as a college basketball coach.

    There were interesting stories and topics in the book, but one of the core items emphasized in the book was Coach Wooden’s emphasis on the fundamentals of the game. He stressed this with his players, asking them to work on the basics and perfect them more than on any complex plays or situations. I tend to focus on the basics when I coach as well, hoping to train players to be good at their jobs, trusting them to react to new situations.

    This feels like advice that is applicable to a data professional as well, especially in the era of new features and functions that continually expand on the capabilities of the Microsoft data platform. While graph structures and containers and Azure Data Factory and Big Data Clusters are amazing new technologies, there is still a need to have good, solid fundamental skills for a SQL Server system. We still expect anyone working in those areas knows how to backup a database, how to write good T-SQL, how to set security for objects, and more.

    If you want to specialize, that’s great. Perhaps you love BI or HA or some other aspect of working with the SQL Server data platform. Just keep in mind that the fundamentals are important, no matter what your job. You ought to be very competent at handling any of those tasks that we would teach a junior DBA in their first year on the job. Once you know those, you can move on to more specific items. If you don’t know those, be sure you include those as part of your learning along with more niche topics.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #108

    tsqltuesdayIt’s that time of month, and this is a good topic as it relates to career learning. I’m a big fan of improving your career, so I like this topic. The invitation is from Mala, one of the people I look forward to seeing each year at various events.

    Non SQL Server Tech

    At heart, I’m something of a data person, though I dabble in various other technologies at times. This year, I made it a point to work on learning two new technologies, one of which was outside of SQL Server. Python was what I chose and I ended up spending some time on various Python courses for about 5 months. Then life and work got in the way.

    I still want to spend a bit more time on Python, but I also recognize that I need a new challenge, so I’m going to pick something else for 2019. For me, this will be CosmosDB.

    I think CosmosDB is a neat technology and has some really good things inside of it, but I really don’t know enough about it. I’ve had minor exposure to NoSQL structures, but not really enough to know how well I’d use them for a project.

    The Plan

    For 2019, or at least for the first quarter(ish), I want to port a database from SQL Server to CosmosDB and play with the differences. I have a few sample ones, but I’ve been compiling a database of some SQL Saturday data and want to use that as a test. I’ll work on moving the data to the different CosmosDB structures, likely a document structure and a graph structure, and gain some experience as to how these work.

    I hope to build a simple REST website that accesses these databases, which should also let me compare the differences for data access and note where one structure might work better than the other.

    I’ll set a reminder for the end of each month in 2019 (Jan-Apr) to evaluate where I am.

  • The SQL Twilight Zone

    Imagine you’ve just returned from holiday and your data professional world is turned upside down. There’s not a single SQL Server left at work, or maybe there’s no job to work with SQL Server. Now, what do you do?

    I’m hoping that’s not the case for me, as I’m actually writing this a couple weeks ahead of time. When this publishes, I’ll have just returned from a holiday in Hong Kong, which I’m guessing is a completely different reality than the one I normally live and work in. I’m very excited as I’ve ever been, so I likely won’t be refreshed and recharged after a quick, 6 day trip to the other side of the world. Hopefully I slept very little and saw quite a bit.

    In any case, I thought about this recently as I chatted with a few fellow data professionals that had left the SQL Server world behind. They had moved on, some with regrets, some happy, but for all of these individuals, there was no more SQL Server. In today’s SQL twilight zone, imagine that you can’t work with SQL Server any longer, but you do need to keep working.

    On which platform would you want to work?

    Perhaps there’s another platform you work on now, or would like to work on. Maybe you’d want to move away from data and do something else? I’m also curious if some of you would be disappointed or just take a move in stride.

    For me, I am a little torn and I’ve have to think a bit more about what to do. I’ve worked on other platforms in the past, and would be comfortable changing if I had to. My first inclination is to say PostgreSQL, which I’ve always admired a bit. It felt immature back when we started SQLServerCentral, but I liked it better than MySQL. And much better than Oracle or DB/2, especially with the tooling.

    My other choice would be CosmosDB. I think what Microsoft is doing here is fantastic, and while there is work to be done, this is a great way to store some new data. The only concern I would have is are there enough jobs for people that work with CosmosDB? Adoption is growing,  but is it enough to build a career on? I’m not sure. Perhaps, but I’d have to make that decision after more research.

    Let us know today. What platform would you move to, or would you leave databases?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Republish: Burnout

    Vacation! In Hong Kong, so you get Burnout again.