Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • Bad Days

    We all have them. As DBAs, there could be many bad days in our career. We poke fun at one of them with our first humorous DBA Team story this year. Hopefully you enjoy that one and smile. I know I got a kick out of reading it when got the first draft.

    However that’s not a really bad day for me. I’ve had some bad days at work involving corruption, missing backups, hardware failures, viruses, and more. Typically they involve fewer car crashes and political games than the DBA Team deals with, but they’re almost as stressful and more than a few have stretched well into the night.

    This week, I’d like to commiserate with you. I’d like to hear about the hard stories that you can now look back on with a smile (or grimace), having managed to move beyond the situation.

    What’s been a really bad day in your DBA career?

    Or perhaps you’ve got a bad development story, an administrator story or something else. What was a time when you thought your career might be over, or you might lose your job? When did you feel a high level of stress over a situation that you thought might overwhelm you? Was there a time you might leave this industry?

    I’m not looking to bring up bad memories, and please remember to be professional with your stories. However I’ve found writing things down can be cathartic. Perhaps you’ve held onto some anxiety for years, or fear about a repeat. Perhaps a little sharing, and empathy from the community, will help you feel better about the situation.

    As always, if you’d like to share anonymously, feel free to send a note to sjones at this domain and I’ll post your story without your name.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Worst Code

    This piece was written awhile ago by Jeff Atwood, but I saw a mention about it recently. It’s about software developers hating software. It’s a fun piece, and written a bit tongue-in-cheek, though with a lot of truth in there. Certainly lots of the “bundled software” that come with gadgets is unnecessary and poorly tested. That’s sad, as there is the chance to add value to products if the software is well written, and perhaps, open sourced.

    However the thing that caught my eye was the ending. Mr. Atwood says that if a developer in an interview doesn’t say the worst code they’ve seen lately is their own, then they may not be a competent developer. I hope that part is also a joke, and I suspect it is. Though I also think that it’s a healthy attitude for people to see room for improvement in most of their endeavors.

    No matter what type of task you are performing, and certainly programming is an area many of us focus, complacency is a poor way to approach your work. We know we won’t be perfect, we know we’ll make mistakes, we know there’s room for improvement, and we know we NEED TO GET THE PROJECT DONE. The balance we strike in moving forward should be accomplishing tasks, learning what we did right and wrong, doing more of the former (and less of the latter) in the future, all while taking pride in the work we do well.

    Certainly some people are obsessive and perfectionists. There’s probably another few choice words some of you have for those individuals, but most of us need to balance our desire to build something amazing, with the necessity of completing work. We also need those little wins that come from having our work solve problems, even if we’d build software better the next time. The important thing is that you try to do better the next time.

    Steve Jones

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

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • #sqlhelp

    I know that Twitter is really representative of only a fraction of the people in the world, and arguably it’s not even a good representation of any group because it’s a self-selective group that chooses to share thoughts, ideas, news, etc. with the world. However I do enjoy the medium, and find myself learning about the world, thinking about opinions, and once in awhile, getting help.

    There is a hashtag on Twitter called #sqlhelp. It’s an amazing tool that I’d highly encourage all of you to consider when you want a quick answer to a problem. Hashtags are a way of denoting tweets about a common subject, though there is no official set of hashtags. You can make one up yourself and see if it catches on.

    #sqlhelp certainly did, and I find it useful for many short, quick questions. While I was writing this piece, I saw questions come up on licensing, Oracle->SQL Server conversions, security in a database, and how to read an execution plan. I also saw some noise, with requests for consultants to teach, product advertisements, and a webinar notice. I’m slightly worried that noise level might overwhelm this channel, but if you’re on twitter, you should try using it for your next problem.

    As with any answer you get from the Internet, you should test things yourself and decide how trustworthy the source is. You might get an answer from Brent Ozar or Paul Randal, but you might get some new DBA on his first day of work. Also be aware that 140 characters can severely limit the questions you can ask. If it’s complex, I’d suggest you try the SQLServerCentral forums instead.

    Whether you like Twitter (and #sqlhelp) or not, I do believe that this is a great example of how our community does a great job of helping each other out. We teach, learn, support, and inspire each other, arguably more than any other industry or technological group I know of. It’s a joy to be a part of the community, and I’d encourage you to join us on Twitter, forums, or local events.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Developers, developers, developers

    StackOverflow ran a survey for their members in 2013 and released some results recently. The results are on their blog, along with some observations about the data. While most of this audience aren’t in the development space, some may be, and the impacts of the results could certainly affect our careers.
    Most developers and applications aren’t getting much accomplished without data, and whether they use SQL Server, another RDBMS, a NoSQL platform, or a dumb data store, chances are we can help them. Chances are also that if they make a poor decision, we’ll be dealing with the mess in some way.
    The observations note that mobile is still growing, and I believe that. I still think the mobile market will dwarf the PC explosion we’ve seen the last 20 years, and that means we should be preparing and understanding how to deal with data from mobile devices, think about scaling to meet lots of small, quick calls for data from a device.
    I also like the fact that more people are working remotely. If they let developers work remotely, that’s a good step towards DBAs becoming remote as well. As someone that has worked from home for over a decade, I appreciate the challenges, but I still can’t help but thing my productivity is much higher than it ever was in an office.
    It’s also nice that the second most popular language (in use) is SQL. Not necessarily T-SQL, as I’m sure various other platforms are developed on, but it does show that SQL is very important, even to developers. Perhaps the next time a developer is struggling with SQL, you can refer them to this survey and then see if you can help them improve their query skills.
    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.