Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Another MVP Award and a Few Thoughts

    I got the news of my MVP award last week. I’m honored that Microsoft feels I do quite a bit for the community. This was my 10th or 11th, though I’m not sure since they changed around the award periods. In any case, it’s been a long time.

    As I saw quite a few people posting their award (or re-award), I also noted a few people that weren’t renewed. I wasn’t surprised, even at some of the big names, since I haven’t seen them in the community much in the last year. Keep in mind, the award is for the most recent award period, not your past.

    I ran across this Twitter account, which I’m guessing is someone that wasn’t re-awarded as an MVP. Personally, I think this is a poor showing of one’s professionalism. I’m sure this is why the account is somewhat anonymous.

    This year we had quite a few that weren’t renewed that have been MVPs for a long time. Usually this isn’t a surprise to the individual, as they often know if they’ve been doing lots of blogging, speaking, etc. This can be surprising to others, since often we assume that person XX is always helping others. The thing I always think about is whether someone has done enough in the most recent period, not in the distant past.

    And, of course, done enough in the area Microsoft cares about. If you’re the number one expert in the world with Notification Services, writing and speaking about how to keep it alive, I’m not sure you’re getting designated as an MVP.

    I have no doubt that if I stopped blogging here and speaking at events, I wouldn’t be renewed. I do some work at SQLServerCentral, but I’m not sure it would be enough if I weren’t volunteering more of my time and knowledge in other ways.

    The award is recognition by Microsoft. It isn’t, nor should it be, any validation of your efforts to help others. You might be a great community volunteer that does a lot of writing, speaking, organizing, and more. Those are all efforts to be proud of and continue to do, if you enjoy them. They just might not be enough to beat out everyone else, again, in Microsoft’s view.

    As a friend told me, play your game. Do what works for you, and reap the rewards if they come. If they don’t, you should still be happy with what you’ve done.

  • #SQLCareer

    Information Technology is a place that I think could be a very good career for many people. Our working conditions are good, the pay is above average, and we can continue to do this job for most of our lives. We have flexibility to work in many locations, and at different hours. There are downsides, as each of those advantages can work against us. We can be expected to work all hours, and in all places, including while on holidays. We don’t have the excuses of not being in an office, and with today’s small machines, we can be asked to carry our work with us wherever we go. How you handle those challenges and achieve balance in life is up to you, but I will say that it can be a burden to do so.

    When I first started to work in this business, I came from positions that required more physical labor and onsite work. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I preferred an office environment, especially as technology became more important and workplaces evolved into casual, even fun, places to spend my day. I’ve appreciated the growing flexibility as bandwidth has increased and remote work became first tolerated, and then accepted. In some cases, it’s even preferred. As my children have grown up, one of the great benefits for me has been the flexible schedule that allowed me to share many moments in their lives. The flipside is that I’ve also had to work many hours while they’re at home, at all hours of the day and night and many weekends.

    When I started working in this field, I had no idea what life would be like, and I bet that many people that are learning about computers are similarly naive. When I’ve spoken with students, or even adults seeking training for a new career, I find that the environment in education, not to mention the tools and techniques, are very different from that of most jobs. I’m regularly reminded of this while talking with my son, who is studying some computer science in university. He’s learning concepts and skills, but missing some of the very basic, practical items that I think academic training ignores.

    I think we can do better. I read Iris Classon’s post about her day, where she covers some of the tasks and flow of her workday. I’m looking forward to reading more about how her life as a developer goes, but I’d also like to put out a challenge to those in the SQL Server community. I think we can help others learn what it’s like to work in our field, either inspiring them to study harder and build more skills, or warn them of the dangers and downsides.

    If you have a blog, I’d like to ask you to write four posts. These could be four days in a row, or one day a week for a month. Once a month is probably too little, but if that’s the time you have, then do that. Let us know how your day goes, what tasks you undertake, the challenges, maybe even a little about the problems you solve. If you enjoy blogging, you’ll get ideas for even more posts. If you don’t, you’ll still build some communication skills. If you like your job, maybe you’ll get excited to share the things that are fun. If you don’t, then you might stop and think as you write about how you can make changes in life. You might even teach yourself something about your own career.

    Either way, you’ll learn something. I’ll ask that you tag these posts on your blog and any sharing you do as #SQLCareer. That way we help others get a sense of what it’s like to work in the Microsoft Data Platform space. If you want to write more, that’s fine, but set a reminder now, and schedule out a few posts about what your job is like.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Mastering Index Tuning–Day 3

    This is a short series of posts on the courses I took with Brent Ozar. I actually completed the courses in the past, but I wrote notes and wanted to revisit the way things went.

    This post looks at the Mastering Index Tuning class. Other  posts are:

    Day 3

    As with Day 2, we begin with reviewing the labs from yesterday. These were harder labs, and Brent spent time looking at how he solved the labs, referencing parts of solutions some people had. This took awhile, with a break in the middle.

    As usual, we can ask questions and discuss the solutions in Slack, which Brent keeps an eye on.

    We start the lectures with artisanal food, which Brent does enjoy. Hand crafted items from the chef, which felt funny since my car killed something and left an organ of some sort in the bathroom.

    The analogy is that there are artisanal indexes, like those on computed columns, indexed views, and filtered indexes. These are items that can help in specific situations, but in general we don’t want to use them.

    I like that Brent brings in the experience they’ve had with clients, noting that some of these features don’t work well.

    The afternoon lab is fix some really bad reporting procedures with indexes (regular or artisanal) or changing code. I know I can’t always change code in databases, but this gives us a chance to try things. I ended up changing some code, but not much. The lab review after lunch was interesting, as Brent had a strange result with the last proc. Looking forward to seeing his debugging of this later.

    The lecture after lunch moves to the end of D.E.A.T.H, heaps. I hate heaps, so this was interesting. Brent agrees with me, you really need a CI on the table. Maybe there are some reasons to not use one in a situation, but most of you need to just add a key.

    The last part of the afternoon looks at the impact of CIs and then constraints and FKs. The CI part is interesting. I see lots of people talking about how to decide on this. I tend to lean towards Brent’s view, which he’s presented on and it’s in the class. Take the class if you want to learn (I don’t want to republish here).

    For FKs/constraints, the module had lots of discussion. People think about FKs in interesting ways. I’ll have to re-watch this as I got busy in the middle with other stuff and missed some lecture.

    The final lab is a big one. Use all the skills from the three days of the class. Restore the db, run a setup that messes up indexes, then fix things. It was a challenge, and I burned about 12 minutes deduping and eliminating indexes, then about 20 coming up with more to add. The creation took quite some time, so I never really got around to tuning, and since this is only part of my day, I had to stop. I do have some real work to do.

    The final lab solution goes up the day after, and what Brent came up with was interesting. I liked watching the videos later to see how he approached the issues and solved them. I like that there wasn’t “one” solution, and he talks about how we might solve the lab that would be different than production.

    That’s important, and it’s something that I appreciated in this class. I know better, but it’s always good to be reminded that the class is a game, a model of what could happen, but in the real world, these are just tools that might help, but could hurt. Judgment is still needed.

    The Aftermath

    One thing I like about this class, which I’ve missed in some live classes, is that I can re watch sections of the class later. The class page has a list of all the lectures and labs, with each containing a video. Some might be from my class, some from previous ones. Since this is delivered and recorded in a modular fashion, Brent can update sections over time.

    I went back to watch the first Artisanal index module, as I was distracted that morning by something at work. That was a nice benefit.

    The Final Word

    This was a great class. I haven’t been to a real class across multiple days in awhile, and I think the format of some lecture, a lab (with interactivity), and then a review of the lab, was great.

    The lectures were interesting, and I learned a few things. The labs were challenging, designed to force you to work within constraints to tune something. Indexing is often a place where you can make changes and rapidly affect your system. The effects could be good or bad, so you need to be sure you are proceeding in a methodical fashion and also capturing metrics on the changes.

    If you’re interested in the class, you can visit the Mastering Index Tuning page to learn more and purchase the class.

  • Mastering Index Tuning–Day 2

    This is a short series of posts on the courses I took with Brent Ozar. I actually completed the courses in the past, but I wrote notes and wanted to revisit the way things went.

    This post looks at the Mastering Index Tuning class. Other  posts are:

    Day 2

    The day starts by looking at homework from last lab. How does Brent do this? One nice thing is that Brent limits the time here for himself. He solves the indexing lab, but stops before some people would. He explains this as he tackles indexing like this. Make some changes, but set a time limit. Then see deploy them and evaluate again after some time.

    We get to watch how he’d solve the lab, and I popped open my VM to check what I’d done. After all, it had been like 16 hours. I saved each lab work in a file on my VM, which was good. I could reference the order in which I’d done things and since I’d save the before/after stats, I could compare with Brent.

    The rest of the day was similar to day 1, with a lecture, a short lab, more lecture, and a long lab over lunch. During this day, we looked at blocking, which is one of those areas where many people have issues. Brent has built a lab that creates blocking, so we can see it happening in our instances.

    While there are different ways you can clear blocking, the challenge here is to use indexes to get rid of blocking. This isn’t the best way to clear blocking, but it is an option, and again, the challenge here is to focus on indexes.

    This was a better day for me, getting into the swing and rhythm of the class as well as starting to feel challenged. I focused more on the labs here, which I wish I’d done a bit more of this on the first day.

    The lab at the end of the day was more complex, though I didn’t have time to get it all done. I got a first pass that seemed to solve some of the issues, and I had to stop since other work was calling. Still, a good day.

    If you’re interested in the class, you can visit the Mastering Index Tuning page to learn more and purchase the class.