Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • Grow Your Skills

    Look to grow your skills on a regular basis.

    The cloud is scary. Without a doubt the idea of outsourcing parts of your organization’s technology department should concern you if you manage systems. Anything outsourced, whether to another firm or automation, means there is less work for you to do. Even in the places where automation grows, we find that sometimes the growth of systems occurs so fast that there are still things for a worker to do, but that’s a losing battle in the long term. At some point the automation will catch up and less people will be needed to manage the systems.

    However the news isn’t all bad. There are some systems that will always be managed inside of a company. Whether because of regulatory requirements, performance needs, or even just the stubbornness of management, I am sure that some percentage of systems at most companies will remain in-house. Those will be the minority of systems in some places, and since many of us change jobs at some point in our careers, we should be concerned.

    I would argue that all of us working in technology should be looking to improve our skills in whatever field we work. However we should be growing the skills in the hard parts of our jobs, in the parts that we struggle to automate or describe. The easy parts of our jobs will become more automated, more likely to be managed by a tool or outsourced. The hard parts, the thoughtful parts, those are the skills we should concentrate on when improving our skills.

    Outsourcing isn’t all bad. As Toyota has outsourced some of their systems, they are not looking to shrink their IT department. Instead they are focusing on delivering new products and services for their customers. Make sure you are prepared to take advantage of new opportunities if your company follows a similar path.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Targeted Learning

    do not disturb
    Targeted learning means the event isn’t all fun and games.

    I received an email just after I arrived in Seattle for the last SQL in the City 2012 stop. It was from Simon Doubt, who was also coming to Seattle for the PASS Summit, but who hadn’t planned on just attending the conference. Simon had actually come to the Pacific Northwest with a plan: The OLAP Sprint.

    After a few years of attending the Summit and being inspired, taught, and excited by the immersion, it was time to up the ante. The idea was simple, even if the execution would be a challenge. Simon wanted to do more than attend a variety of talks and have interesting conversations. In seven days in Seattle he planned on learning to build an OLAP solution.

    You can read about his journey and it’s an interesting one. It was a success, and while it hasn’t created an OLAP expert, I’m sure that Simon has gained a lot of things from his focused effort. It’s a starting point to learn more. It’s an accomplishment of a fairly difficult task, and it’s a great story that should help a career move forward. This is certainly something I’d put on my resume.

    Throughout the week as I read each entry, I noticed this was a way to tackle the week long conference not as a break from work, but as an exciting new project. The posts showed someone that was taking advantage of the resources at a conference to grow their knowledge and skills. This is a great example of what a plan can do for you, and how you can show your boss that the money spent on this type of training is worthwhile.

    Not everyone will have a plan, and I’d guess most don’t, but the next time you ask for funding think about including a plan of what you are looking to accomplish in a week. Whether you’re attending a conference or an Immersion event, having a plan, with a few specific goals can show that you are using the money you get wisely.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Refreshing

    DadDelaney_ski_Mar2012I hope everyone has a great week this week. I’m off, trying to recharge and refresh after a rough speaking schedule this fall.

    My family has a tradition of spending Thanksgiving up in the mountains skiing. There isn’t a lot of snow, but I look forward to skiing, dominos, ping pong, and more with my wife and kids.

    You should be sure that you take a break periodically from work and make sure you refresh and recharge. All too often I see people skipping vacation, which isn’t good your mental health.

  • The Future of DBAs

    truck data center
    Is this the future of many data centers?

    At SQL Saturday #169 in Denver I sat in on a panel that talked about cloud computing. There was a consultant, a customer, and a Microsoft representative that give different perspectives on what their experiences were with Windows Azure. It was an interesting talk and the more I learn about the cloud, the more potential situations where I think it applies. It’s not for everyone, but there are a lot of places where it can work, and I would encourage you to learn more about cloud services and cloud computing.

    One really interesting question was asked. Do you know the skills needed for modern Microsoft data centers? Truck driver. A truck driver can drop off a shipping container with servers pre-configured inside and just plug it in to power and network, often with no cooling needed. A fenced in parking lot, open to the atmosphere, makes a nice, inexpensive, low maintenance data center.

    That’s simplified, but it has interesting implications for networking, hardware, and system administrators, but what does that mean for DBAs? How will our jobs change if these shipping containers run SQL Server services on Azure or AWS? It’s a good question, and one that I know worries many people that manage SQL Servers.

    On one hand our jobs don’t change. We still need to manage the data, enforce quality, design tables and manage indexes. We must ensure the data is available, intact, accessible by clients. We import, export, and even recover it at times. These are all the core skills of a DBA. On the other hand, we have new challenges to manage. Our recovery process will change. We will need to learn how to scale out our data and applications. We will need to better set expectations for performance, and perhaps more closely expand and contract the resources we use to match the demand we receive. In order to do that, we’ll also have to better understand the financial costing models that vendors provide, along with gathering more knowledge on the actual value our organization receives from more, or fewer, resources.

    The idea of remote computing, whether as hosted VMs or a platform that provides database services, is going to be a part of many of our careers. We might as well embrace it, understand it, and find a way to fit in.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.