Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Unwired for Weeks

    I took a few weeks off recently for a vacation with my family. We traveled from Denver to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and then on to Glacier National Park in Montana. We drove a horse trailer, camping along the way in the vast outdoors of America. It was a wonderful time and a beautiful part of the country. If you get the chance to visit, I’d highly recommend the trip.

    One of the interesting things on this trip was that I was very unwired. In fact, I didn’t even take a laptop, which is a rarity for me. Often I’ll take one to jot notes, sketch an editorial, or just have around to check on things. This time, I didn’t bother, and neither did my wife. One kid did, but only because he was enrolled in a couple classes (CS and Math) this summer and had assignments to do.

    The only device I had was my phone, which didn’t have service for much of the trip. Both during long drives (I was glad Google Maps downloads directions), at many of our campsites, and in the national parks, there was little service. In fact, when I did have service, I was surprised. The camping locations did have wi-fi, but I only used it to upload pictures of the trip and didn’t even bother checking social media as I posted. I mostly uploaded pictures to ensure I had a backup.

    I did check email once early on to be sure that I hadn’t forgotten anything from work early, and forwarded on a couple items to people, but when I arrived home last week, I had hundreds of messages from Redgate and probably close to a thousand from SQLServerCentral. It was quite a chore handling and deleting a number of items, and took half of my Monday back in the office.

    What was interesting to me is that I didn’t really miss the social media much, certainly didn’t miss the news, and nothing that important came up. I didn’t worry about work, knowing that something would go wrong (such as a few buggy questions) and that someone would handle the situation (thanks to Grant for fixing things) or delay the item until I returned. I found numerous meetings canceled or rescheduled without me and quite a few hastily dashed emails or queries that were later retracted or amended. In fact, going through emails from newest to oldest allowed me to delete older, out of date messages without reading them.

    I rarely take more than a few days off at a time, usually just a long weekend here and there, but this proved (again) something I’ve suspected for a long time. Much of the pressure we feel with deadlines at work is arbitrarily imposed. Whether we do it to ourselves or someone else picks a datetime, there isn’t any rationale for the choice. Usually the goal is to complete work as fast as possible, but if there are delays, if something comes up, with life, other tasks, unforeseen failures (hardware/software) get in the way, the business will survive.

    I learned a long time ago that despite my best efforts, things will go wrong and there will be delays. I’ve learned to expect them, accept them and try to not add any extra stress on myself when things are delayed. Go home at a reasonable hour most of the time, live the rest of your life, while doing the best professional job you can. There will always be more work, and the business will survive if most of your work ends up being delayed slightly.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 6.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Day 2–#SQLCareer

    This is a series of posts on what my day is like. I don’t do a lot of production technical work, but life as an evangelist is interesting, so here goes. Join the #SQLCareer movement and post about your day. Just a random day, not one that is anything special.

    I’m actually looking back a few days. I’m on holiday, which might be interesting to some, but isn’t a part of my career. Here’s a look back at July 18, the day before my last post.

    3:20am – get up to throw clothes in the dryer. I fell asleep last night after they went in the wash, but I need a Redgate shirt done. Not sure why I woke up now, but since I did might as well get something done.

    5:28am – wake up for real. I have an early flight and need to leave the house by 6. I like to set a random time, so rather than 5:30 or 5:25, it’s 5:28 today. I get up, get clean, and double check my packing. I have a bag always packed with running shoes, toiletries, phone cord, and a day of clothes. Since I travel regularly, I just keep this ready. If it’s more than a 2 day trip, I add stuff, but today I just go get my Redgate shirt from the dryer and load it.

    I’m also forgoing my laptop bag since I’m just doing slides with someone else, so I toss my laptop and charger in the bag. I load the car and I’m out the door by 6:05.

    Arrive at the airport and it’s packed today. PRE only has 2 people scanning and it’s a busy Wednesday in Denver. The line must be 100 people deep, which is still much better than the 300-400 people in the main line. I scan emails on my phone while waiting and in 5-10 minutes they add a few more staff members and things go smoothly.

    I ate a protein bar on the drive in since I wasn’t sure I’d have time at the airport. I didn’t, so I’m glad. I get on the flight, and surprisingly, no one is in my row. I watch a bit of the Bosch series on Prime that I’d downloaded. Once we’re in the air, I pull out the laptop and go over my presentation since I’m supposed to rehearse today with others.

    9:00 local – arrive in Vegas. No checked bags, so I walk out and schedule and Uber as I’m walking through the terminal. I get to the garage and 2-3 minutes later my ride takes me to the Mandalay.

    9:30 – I’ve walked through the hotel to the convention center. Everything is big in Vegas, including the walks. I’m rolling a bag with me, navigating by guess. It’s day 3 of the conference and there are no registration crowds. I go up and there’s no badge for me. Since I’m replacing someone else at the last minute, I expected this, so I go to the help area.

    Microsoft has a privacy policy, and they can’t confirm the other person from Redgate is or isn’t registered, but also need written proof to move a registration. It’s a bit of a catch-22, though I’m not annoyed. I’m sure it will get straightened out. I text my Microsoft co-speaker and he says he’s on the way.

    He arrives and tries to get information. He apparently has no more pull than I do. After talking with the registration staff for a bit, we realize that this isn’t working. He tries to search for some email that might let him slip me in while I start pinging people at Redgate.

    10:00 I finally get a Slack call from a product manager at Redgate who helped put this together. Slack is great here, and quick. A chat turns into a phone call without the hassles of exchanging international numbers and hoping they go through. Plus there are no expenses this way.

    I chat with him and he tries to find some way of getting proof that I can take someone’s place. He’s pinging IT to try and get an email delegation and also trying to contact the original person that was supposed to speak, but who is on holiday.

    10:30 – Finally get authorization from the person sent in an email. Registration looks at it and says, yep, that’s fine. They check and say the person never registered.

    Hmmm, this is getting better.

    Another phone call and more email searches. I get the original invite from Microsoft, but when I try to register, it’s locked to the original email account. Another phone call and I have that person try to register, since the event company says they’ll switch it.

    10:45 – I get a phone call from Redgate. It’s $2400 for the conference, and it ends in about 26 hours (Thur after lunch). What do we think? I don’t know. I’ve got friends at Microsoft pinging me to come to the Bruno Mars concert that night. I was thinking to sit in a few sessions and see what other partners see. My Microsoft contact says he can’t do anything. If they didn’t send a code for a free registration, there isn’t one.

    However, that’s a lot. I’m delivering part of one session and that doesn’t seem right. I check with registration and it’s $995 for a Wednesday pass, $495 for a Thursday one. As much as I’d like to see friends and Bruno Mars, it’s not worth $1000. I’m sure Redgate would be fine, but it feels like a poor use of money. At this point, I’ve spent over 90 minutes trying to get registered for the conference, on the phone, pacing on a hard concrete floor. I check with the young lady to be sure she’ll be around Thursday as I need the speaker badge. She will be, so I thank her and tell me Microsoft co-speaker that we can practice later. He says he’s gotten busy and doesn’t have time, but we can meet Thursday am.

    I head back through the convention center to Starbucks. I feel like at 11:20, I’ve gotten nothing done. I sit down with a cup of coffee and open my laptop. At least I can get something done.

    11:30 Part of my job is helping customers at times, or the salespeople. In Slack, we find a customer having concerns about a tool working with temporal tables. We have some smart engineers, but they don’t always know the intricacies of how SQL Server works. Grant, Kathi, and I often help out. Since I’ve gotten nothing done, I take this up.

    I tell them there shouldn’t be an issue here, but let me check. While sitting in Starbucks, I plug in headphones and start setting up a temporal table and then work with our product. In this case, I need to disable the system versioning, do something, then enable it. I mess with this for an hour, where it seems that disabling system versioning and turning it back on see to not track changes. I search for reports of issues.

    1:00 – I need lunch. I know some of this works, but I’m missing something. I head over to a nearby place, order, and then start checking SQLServerCentral and reading a few threads to make sure things are fine. I do a little phone browsing on temporal tables and it hits me. When I disable system versioning, the link to the history table is broken. Unlike most features, if I turn things off, I can’t just turn them on. If I want the same history table, I need to relink it.

    1:30 – Rather than go back to Starbucks, I decide to see if my hotel will check me in. It’s two blocks away, so I decide to walk. Enjoy the day.

    I head out and walk to the Luxor and then start slightly regretting this. It’s 106F in Vegas, and I’m rolling a back down a street with no shade. To make things worse, I’ve passed the tram and it’s about as far back to it as it is to the parking garage for the Tropicana. I press on. It’s not that hot.

    2:00 – I spend a few minutes chilling in the AC and watching some people gamble in the early afternoon. I don’t get gambling, but that’s me.

    Since I travel a lot, I have status with some companies. The hotel company is one and they let me check in early. I go to the room and continue to work on my PoC. I immediately get things working and then start to write up a summary as a blog. I run through the demo a few times and be sure the code looks OK and then publish it. I send the link to the sales engineers to forward to a customer. If you’re interested, you can read it here.

    That done, I close out some work for the day. I’ve been needing to finish editing an article, so I do that and check on the schedule of content for SQLServerCentral. Since I’m leaving on holiday, I need to get ahead of the game. I get a few newsletters scheduled and then hit the gym.

    6:30pm – After the gym, I work a little longer. I rehearse the presentation a few more times to be sure I know what I’m saying. This was dropped on my less than a week ago, and I want to deliver it smoothly.

    I’m debating about what to do. Alone in Vegas, friends all at a concert. I’m considering a comedy show in the Tropicana. I like those, and it would be a nice break. I decide to get dinner.

    8:00pm – I’ve finished a dinner in the Robert Irving Public House restaurant and had a couple beers. They made it seem really nice on the hotel site and that reservations are needed. They aren’t on a July Wednesday. I sat at the bar, but the place was almost empty.

    I’m beat and it’s been a long day. I’m glad I didn’t get into Inspire today and that I didn’t buy tickets for a show. I’m going to bed.

    9:15pm – After reading a little for pleasure, I’m done.

    That was my day. A little stress, but nothing major. The plan went sideways, but I recovered and made it a productive day.

  • The Challenge of Failure and of Being Unwired

    Today is my last day at work for a couple weeks. Actually, I’m not done yet. I travel to Louisville today forthe SQL Saturday tomorrow and then I return home Sunday. I’ll be traveling away on Monday, so this is really my last day in the office. I hope. It’s possible I’ll realize over the weekend I’ve forgotten something and need to tackle it remotely, but I’m hoping that won’t be the case.

    While I won’t be completely unable to do anything, I am hoping that I’ll remain unwired for the two weeks. We are traveling to remote locations for some of the time, and there might not be cell service, and certainly not wi-fi. There will be some access on some days, as my son is taking an online class this summer and he has work to do, but I’m going to try and stay off email and Twitter, using my phone to just read and take/post pictures.

    Getting away from work is a challenge for many of us in technology. Earlier in my career, and for many years running this site, I struggled to take time off. I’d regularly check on the site, even writing editorials at times while on holiday. I can still remember using a public terminal at a hotel years ago to connect with work. In the last few years, I’ve gotten better, and taking time off for a 6 week sabbatical really helped. I even take all my vacation most years.

    That’s something that plenty of us still need to learn. I saw a post from someone recently that was on vacation and checking email. There were issues, though a backup person was supposed to handle them. I get the compulsion to check on anything for which you have responsibility. I get the habit of looking at email. I get the desire to just fix things. Those are feelings that I think many of us experience.

    What I’ve learned over time is that most of the work we do isn’t that critical. Certainly our employer’s systems can affect operations, profitability, and more, but they’re not our systems. They’re the responsibility of the organization to run, which includes ensuring there are backup resources, human and otherwise, that can manage systems. For those of us that are on top of our jobs, that are the go-to person, that don’t just maintain, but actively improve systems, we need to let others make decisions, even poor ones, and bear that same burden. Ultimately that’s how others learn and get better.

    I experience this as a parent, and I’m sure many of you do as well. We want our children to do better, to avoid the mistakes we’ve made in the past. We often try to actively manage how our kids live, or prevent them from making a poor decision. Across three kids and many years, I’ve learned to step back more and allow my kids to fail. It’s hard, one of the harder things in my life to not act or say something, but allow them to make a mistake. Even at work I’ve started to step back at times and hold my tongue if I’m not positive I need to say something. Instead, I try to listen more and accept that things will be less than perfect.

    That’s OK. We strive to become better, to improve our systems, to increase efficiency, but it’s possible to do too much. To overspend resources on tuning, or indeed, not make things better but worse. We can overcomplicate things to the point where others can’t understand them, or  perhaps worse, we encourage mistakes from the complexity we’ve introduced.

    Life requires some balance, as do our careers. Work hard, improve things where you can, meet your obligations and take responsibility for your mistakes. Accept that others will make mistakes, and that you are not irreplacible while you enjoy your time away. I’m hoping I will during the next two weeks.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • My #SQLCareer Day–July 19

    I’ve asked for #SQLCareer posts, and I haven’t done any. My job isn’t a data platform DBA or developer, but it is SQL related, so a glimpse of the nonsense I perform. I’m asking for more posts, so a note at the bottom.

    This should have been a cool day, after all, I’m scheduled for my first (partial) presentation at Microsoft’s Inspire conference. It turned out to be not so great.

    The day started with my waking up in the Tropicana in Las Vegas. I was a last minute addition to the Inspire staff, so I grabbed the nearest Hilton. I travel enough that it’s worth me to try and stick with one airline and hotel company. As I write this, I got two free nights for my wife and daughter in South Dakota this week for a volleyball camp.

    However, I get up around 7 and pack up. As I’m doing so, my daughter calls. I took her car key while she was gone to get copies made.  A minor crisis distracted me on Tuesday afternoon and her key is in my car. At the Denver airport.

    I apologize for the hectic, chaotic nature of my life and for not putting it back. I make mistakes, and know my kids do as well. I expect them to apologize, and I should do the same.

    I check emails and answer a few, then shower and pack up.

    7:45am – Walk across the bridge to catch the tram from the Excaliber to the Manadalay Bay resort. It’s got to be 90F this morning already, and I find the first station is blocked off for construction. Great.

    Walk to street level and start heading to the next station. I get there and don’t see an easy way up. It’s a coin flip to walking inside and looking for a way or crossing the street to the Luxor. Everything is far in Vegas, and I elect to walk. I get into the Luxor and it seems as easy to use the internal walkway to the Mandalay as it is to wait for the the tram.

    7:52 – Starbucks. Priorities, yo.

    8:05 – Inspire registration. I had problems on Wed, so I needed to complete this today. I start, click to pick my MS account login, and when I click the “Next” button, the internet disappears. Fortunately the event staff was helpful and brought me a laptop to complete registration.

    8:30 – The Inspire schedule is a bit of a mess. I’m not sure where to go, but pick my co-speaker and he texts me directions to the room. I head over and sit down, watching a few other Microsoft partners talk about their companies and strategies.

    I have 3000 steps today, but I see a couple interesting things that partners are doing. One of which might be something we try at Redgate. In any case, it’s an interesting half hour. Then I head over to an empty room to practice my talk with co-speakers, go over timing, and review my notes.

    9:45 – We’re on. There are three of us talking about SQL Operations Studio, which seems to be Ops Studio to MS. I have 15 minutes at the end, so I stand around for a bit. Me on stage, just waiting around. The professional look today.

    IMG_20180719_094939

    While waiting on stage, I check Slack and respond to a few messages. I do my talk, get one question, and then walk out. That’s after I’ve finished my coffee.

    11:00 – The schedule seems to be just some general partner stuff to close the day. I ping a friend for lunch, but he’s down the strip at another hotel. With a 1:30 flight, I decide to give up and get a cab to the airport.

    Not wanting to waste time, I forgo an Uber and get a cab. The guy talks a slightly long way around the West side of the airport, which is annoying. It’ s not my money, but at Redgate, we try to spend wisely. This feels like I should have stood around waiting for an Uber. I could have answered a few emails while waiting. I did that in the cab, but likely I didn’t save anything other than a few minutes standing and wasted $5.

    In any case, I get to the airport, walk to security, get through and make my way to the terminal. I do this enough that if I don’t try to be efficient, I waste lots of time. Fortunately from taxi drop off to sitting down for lunch is about 15 minutes for me. I sit there and go through a few product items on Slack, and respond to a question on the Redgate Hub. Nothing that important, but it’s the type of busy work that will catch up to me if I don’t get things done.

    Post lunch I still have about 45 minutes before boarding, so I pull out the laptop, charge my phone, and start this post. I also answer a few emails and load some Database Weekly items for the newsletter. It’s my week to get links and write an editorial, so I try to do a little of this everyday. I find it keeps me in touch with what’s happening in the database world.

    One article is on Managed Instances in Azure and how they are different. It’s interesting and I learn about the Job Object, which I knew nothing about. I always seem to learn a few things every week that I didn’t know from someone. I also caught up on a couple SQL Career posts from Jen Stirrup and Brent Ozar.

    The flight home is fine, but it’s cramped. I don’t do any work and just read a bit and watch part of a movie. I seem to see parts of movies here and there, but never bother to finish if they’re not that interesting.

    6:30pm – I hit the gym on the way home for 30 minutes and then get my daughter’s keys made and then some chores at home.

    7:45pm – One last check of things and finish this post. I realize I’ve scheduled tweets for the next three newsletters all tomorrow.  Grrr, I delete them all and need to rebuild the schedules. Takes about 30 minutes.

    Not a productive workday, but since I travel again Friday to SQL Saturday Louisville, I’ll let it go.