Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • Challenge Yourself

    I am a proponent of blogging as a way to build your brand. Your work showcases your knowledge, thought process, and interests. It provides a way for potential employers to perform due diligence and determine if you are a good fit for their team and position. Blogging can also help you to learn more about your craft and focus your learning. After all, it’s been said that if you can’t explain something to others, perhaps you don’t really understand it.

    As I meet people, and talk to them about blogging, I often get asked “what should I write about?”. The easy answer is to write about the things that you do on a regular basis, the problems you solve at work, and the solutions you implement. However, what do you write about if you don’t do much at work and are looking to learn new topics. If you want to show that you are building experience with SQL Server in a way that isn’t required at your current position?

    I think it’s easy, and I’ll give you a few ideas. First, build a lab at home. These days it’s easy (and free) with VirtualBox and a little memory, both of which can be had for relatively small investments. Next, start following the #tsql2sday tag on Twitter and challenge yourself to get a post written every month. However don’t stop there. I keep a list of previous topics and you can go back and write a post for every one of those topics. Your effort won’t be in the recap, but you’ll force yourself to learn, or at least explain, your thoughts in those areas.

    If you want additional challenges, read a question like this one on splitting strings. Don’t read the replies, but try to answer the question on your own by writing a blog that explains your solution. You can link to the post and show how you would solve the issue if you encountered it. If you want to press yourself further, go through my list of article requests and pick one. It doesn’t matter if the article has been written and published or not. Write your own solution on your own blog, as I saw Jason Carter do here for this request on exporting XML files. Feel free to submit your post as an article, and maybe we’ll publish your solution as well.

    There are so many ways to challenge yourself and learn more about SQL Server that it could be a full time endeavor by itself. Please don’t make it one, and remember to balance your career growth with the rest of your life. However, do continue to work regularly on your career, and showcase your knowledge. It’s good practice for your communication skills, and you never know when you might count on the wide breadth of knowledge you’ve documented to help you land that dream job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The Mentoring Experiment – Closing Thoughts

    Andy wrote a post today called The End of the Mentoring Experiment, which is something we’ve talked about for some time. In fitting with the decision, and perhaps justifying it further, we decided to do this a few months back, but as with many things, we haven’t gotten to it until today.

    I remember when we started this, and we were very excited and interested. The first cycle of matches, using 8 people we hand picked, consumed a lot of time, and while it was successful, it was difficult to scale. We continued on a couple other cycles, trying to tweak to process a bit, but never found a way to manage this effectively, given other parts of our lives, and were never quite comfortable with automating too much of the experiment away.

    We also struggled with the idea of accidently making some mistake, breaking someone’s privacy, or causing harm to another’s career or life. Andy wrote a few things about this, and it made sense to us.

    We do believe in mentoring, and I hope that those of you looking to grow your careers take time to look for mentors. If you need advice or want help, ask. There are lots of people that will probably give you a little time. It’s not a sign of weakness to need or want a mentor. It’s a sign of maturity.

    For those of you with some experience, keep an eye out for someone that might ask for help, or maybe just seem to be lost. Tread lightly, and carefully, but offer to be a sounding board if they’d like one. You can really make a difference in someone’s career with a little effort.

  • The Ten Commandments for DBAs

    I like lists, and this list certainly caught my eye: the 10 commandments of database management. It’s from a lead database architect that has experience with a variety of RDBMS’s as well as NoSQL technologies. It’s an interesting list, and one that tries to cover all the aspects of a DBA’s job.

    It’s a good list and for the most part it’s how I’ve tried to manage systems throughout my career. I believe in monitoring systems. I believe in testing backups. I believe in change management, though it doesn’t have to be heavy-handed. I think automation is key, and certainly DBAs should understand the pros and cons of their platform.

    However, I don’t know that I think upgrades should be completed for systems without some evaluation of the benefits and risks. These days, with releases of database platforms coming every 2-3 years, I’m not sure that I would want to upgrade many of my systems to each version. I might skip every 2-3 versions and upgrade rarely.

    I recognize that some of these can be outside the control of the DBA, but to the best of their ability, I do think a DBA should be looking to help developers, secure their systems, and choose the best systems to meet their needs, given whatever restrictions their organization puts on them.

    I don’t know that this is the best list of commandments for a DBA, but it’s certainly a great start. It’s also a good basis on which to conduct yourself as a DBA if you don’t have a well defined code you follow.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

  • Prepping for 2015

    It’s important that you regularly work on your career to continue to grow, and these days, ensure that you can find a job. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, an electrician, a banker, or a technologist, the world seems to be regularly changing many of our jobs. Whether we need to deepen our current skills or learn a few new related ones, I think it’s just prudent to continue to develop yourself as a professional.

    I think it’s fun as well when you can learn a new skill or two.

    I ran across a post that talks about the top skills that will be in demand in 2015. There are 9 items, and while you should take this information with a grain of salt, it is an interesting list in a few ways. I would guess it’s fairly representative of those areas that recruiters are having a hard time finding people, so while your SQL Server, C#, Javascript, etc. skills are still valuable, adding one or more of these might help you feel a bit more confident you could get a new job if you needed one in 2015.

    PowerShell is the first skill listed, and I think it’s important. If you work in the Unix world, you probably already know how to script in one of the shells, and for Windows people, PowerShell is the equivalent. Whether you manage one server or 100, this can help you more consistently handle your environment. For SQL Server people, there are some very handy uses for Powershell, especially for file type operations or DR, so I think it’s worth learning.

    Many of the other skills like cloud computering, O365 and Google Apps, compliance, mobile, are more buzzword driven, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable skills. Managers hire people and write checks, and if they think some of these areas are worth implementing projects in, they’ll be jobs available.

    The last item listed is soft skills, and if you had to pick one area to work on, this would be the one I’d recommend for most of you. Soft skills translate to any company and any position. They are more and more important these days as scarcity of jobs mean that employers have choices, and when all your candidates have similar technical skills, the things that stand out are the people that communicate better, act as team players and can build bonds with others.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.