Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • Learning Goals –June 2018 Update

    The June update for T-SQL Tuesday #97. I made a plan and it’s hard to stick to.

    tl;dr – Very little done.

    I traveled the first three weeks of June here and there. Two short trips from 1-2 and 8-10, then a long trip from 16-22 and holiday from 22-27. That means I had a class on June 4-6, with a webinar in there as well. That means I really had just June 7, 28, 29 to do anything. There was a little bit of time on the 18th and 19th, but really it’s been a busy work month, with time outside of  work being spent traveling or with family.

    Extended Events

    Nada.

    Well, maybe almost nada. I did do some testing of Jonathan Kehayias’ conversion script from trace to XE session. I started this in May, but finished off the article and rechecked the work, even building some load scripts to help test things. Article published on SQLServerCentral, so something done.

    Python

    Very little. I worked on some of Project Euler with my kid, getting a few more items done, but got stuck when my Prime script ended before the answer on number 7. I saved the work and answer, thinking I might look at it on the plane, but no go.

    I may try to get to a little today, as I’ll be offline for a bit getting my car looked at and writing.

    Overall

    Not a good career growth month, but a good month for my career as I attended 5 events, delivering 6 sessions. I also got most of a week of holiday, so we’ll call this a maintenance month.

  • Prepping for Mastering Index Tuning with Brent Ozar Unlimited

    I got the chance to sign up for a few courses from the Brent Ozar Unlimited team and took it. I struggle to find time for training, between work commitments, travel, and family time, it’s hard to fit in a day or two. I’ve almost given up on going to in-person classes mostly because of the time involved.

    I’m trying this online, both to learn something and see how the experience is. I’ve watched Brent present many times, and I think he does a good job of explaining concepts. While I suspect there’s a good amount of things in this course that I’ll already know, my experience is that it’s both good to get reminded of concepts from a different point of view as well as get some tips/tricks that I might not know. I’m always amazed how I might learn one small thing in a beginner session that I never knew.

    Signup

    The signup is simple. Go to the class page and add this to your cart and pay for it. The process is simple, and you get a good agenda as well as a schedule. I really appreciate the schedule, including the breakdown into what’s covered during different blocks.

    There are multiple dates/times to choose from, but this is online during the workday, Eastern US time, so plan accordingly. For me, this means a slightly early morning, but since I can turn up the speakers and walk to the coffee machine, this works out well.

    There are other classes on their home page, including Database DevOps, PowerShell, SSIS, and Data Science. There are plenty of more mainstream DBA/developer type SQL Server classes as well.

    Prep

    A couple weeks before the class, I got one of those automated emails from GoToWebinar. I’m used to receiving 3-4 of these before an event, so I promptly ignored it.

    Then I got a second one a few days later, and I decided to look at this one. I managed to actually read this section:

    “To get ready, go here:
    https://BrentOzar.com/xxxxxx
    And read the “0.1 Before the Class” module. There’s a ton of prep work and instructions in there for you, including a few videos to watch to prep, and you can download the slides to follow along. ” 

    I removed the URL, since I’m not sure this is public, but in any case, I clicked the link to find a description of the class, in usual well-written Brent style. There was also a series of links on the side, for various slides and labs.

    The Before the Class is a page with 4 videos from Brent that are supposed to prep you and give you some background. It’s 69 minutes, so I set aside some time and got moving.

    And I ran out of time. I watched 3 of the videos, but ended up not getting the fourth one done before the class because of family and travel commitments. I should have tried to watch more in short periods, but I kept putting things off. I know a lot of this stuff, but if you’re new to the class and want to learn this, spend the time to get some basics down.

    Testing Equipment

    I didn’t bother, mostly because I use GoToWebinar every few weeks, between my work or watching other things. As a result, I know my PC works. If you don’t do that, make sure you set things up.

    Contact and Notifications

    I went back and looked. I got these notifications:

    • A confirmation of the purchase
    • A 2 week notices that asked me to go to the class page, and also get started on Slack.
    • A 2 week (minus 1 day) email that asked me to read the “0.1 Before the Class” module.
    • Two 4 day notices, a day apart (one was a 3 day notice). Not sure if this was correct, but these were roughly the same.
    • An email the day before the class with a VM URL and credentials
    • A “start in 1 hour” notice

    That might seem like a lot, but I think this is pretty good. I might miss one of the advance notices in a busy world, so it’s nice to get the second one. I could glance at it and delete it if I had read the previous one.

    There’s a good amount of prep stuff out there, and Brent has each module of his class recorded, so I could have gotten ahead and watched some of the class ahead of time. I could have also played with labs a bit, though he warns you IN CAPS to be careful about not breaking some things.

    Overall

    The process before the class was well done. There is a good amount to help me prepare, but I won’t know until I get to the class if the prep was good enough.

    Looking forward to starting. Actually, but the time this publishes, I might have started, so we’ll see.

  • Learning Goals–May Update

    It’s 5 months in, and this is hard. I find that the time I’ve picked each week sometimes gets bumped by other items, which do have a higher priority. More on this later.

    Extended Events

    An epic fail here for May. I started with one week and managed to get an hour watching part of a PASS session and building a few questions. However, the second week I got busy with some family stuff that impacted my work week. With deadlines and travel the third week, I skipped this.

    The third week I was gone, and the fourth, well, only a little focus, though I did start to write a short piece on using Jon Kehayias’ script to convert a trace to an XE session. We’ll see if I get this done.

    Fifth week, not sure. That Tuesday will be in the June update.

    Python

    Not a lot better than the XE stuff. Week one I had some family issues get in the way of my Friday learning and ended up skipping this as I was away from home. With a busy weekend, I didn’t make this up.

    Week 2 I was prepping for week 3. Week 3 I was gone.

    This brings me to week 4. While I like to try and do something, I really didn’t get much done during the week. I am looking to add Python questions to the mix on SSC, so I have taken a little time during the week to build a couple questions. Going through basics like lists and dictionaries helps me come up with things that I think people might not know and can get inspired to learn a little with a question. That helped me get a few things done this month.

    I did take time to go through part of a Pluralsight course in week 4, about 90 minutes of total time, some of that pausing the course so I could generate a question and practice some Python skills.

    I keep a few browser tabs open with Python links to try some problem solving, but I keep not making time.

    Moving Forward

    I didn’t travel much until mid May, but I had a very busy life outside of work and didn’t make much time to learn away from work. Fortunately my work is related to these topics, so I can take a little time for learning.

    As I close out the first half of the year, I’m somewhat disappointed with progress. I definitely continue to learn, as my job requires it, but I’m not getting the focused time in these areas. Looking forward to next year, I want to aim for topics that are more tightly integrated with work so that I get more practice. Here, even though I’m doing something, I’m not as focused.

    For June and further, I’m going to shift my times around and pick what I think are quieter times for me to get something done. Since I can ride a bike at home and watch Pluralsight, I’ll pick those times for at least passive learning. Then I’ll set aside a shorter time period, 30 minutes, for practice at other points in the week when I have found myself with time.

  • Learning Goals–April Update

    Here is the update: I did better.

    Extended Events

    I did a little more multi-tasking this month, ensuring that if I rode the stationary bike for exercise, I had my tablet and watched some Pluralsight or read some content.

    Here I learned a few things:

    Predicates

    These short circuit, and this means that we want to write our predicates to end early if possible. We also want to write our predicates to look at local data before global data so that we can stop event code as early as possible.

    There is also a 3000 byte limit, so be careful with structuring the event predicate statement.

    I also found that u_tables.sql lets me rebuilt the default sessions for an instance. It’s in the install folder. That’s handy as there are times that I’ve removed the default sessions or changed them and I’d like to get back to the beginning.

    Event Sessions

    The structure for event sessions is like DDL for other objects. These are always created with events, but we can remove all events. I’m not sure why you want the placeholder, but it’s an interesting anomaly. I suspect that this is a hole in the DDL parser.

    I also learned you can drop sessions without stopping them. Convenient? Sure. However, this means that I could make a mistake and not get a question about dropping a session that I, or someone else, is using.

    Changing event or target configuration means dropping and adding back the item. That’s good to know. No way to alter an event predicate.

    Python

    I made it a point to do some coding every week, and work on Python. I did some fundamentals, ensuring I understood how modules work and are imported. I spent some time on variables and mutable/immutable items. I wanted to be sure I understood how these worked compared to other variables. It’s good to know that some of the assignments don’t create a new variable, but merely set a pointed to the existing item.

    I set up a Jupyter notebook in Azure, which was interesting. I need to use this more, and perhaps do some coding here on the Advent of Code or other projects. I solved a couple more days of puzzles, which was fun. These are challenging, and it took a little time to work through items.

    I didn’t do this every week, as I had some travel this month, but I did make an effort to work in python a bit more.