Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Women’s History Month and Being Better

This month is Women’s History Month, and it’s a chance to stop and think about the impact that women have had in history. After reading Monica Rathbun’s post on being a women in the SQL Server community, I wanted to drop a few notes.

Personally, I think this month is a good chance for me to think about the impact women have had in history. For example, after seeing Hidden Figures, I stopped and did a little research to see just how impactful women were in the space program, and how little my early education taught me that.

The more I learn across time and in different places, the more I realize how much we are shaped by the history we learn, and the more I realize how incomplete what we learn can be. We certainly can’t learn everything, but I find more and more that various minorities, genders, and even other cultures (non-US for me) have had an impact I never realized.

This isn’t to complain or chastise anyone, but rather just an opportunity to stop and take a little time this month to learn more. The Women’s History Month site might be a good place to start.

Being a Better Community Member

I’ve had the honor of knowing and working with some amazing women in this business. I hope that I have treated them as peers and the highly knowledgeable and talented professionals that they are. Kalen Delaney, specifically, was one of my heroes and inspirations early in my career, and I’ve been honored to not only meet her, but be able to call her a friend.

I’ve also seen some poor behavior, with men treating women at events like they are entertainment or potential mates, without understanding these are our peers. While being attracted to others is natural and will happen in any environment, I do think that some people, especially men, forget that they should be careful not to make others uncomfortable, and certainly not unsafe.

In trying to be better, I know that others of all genders may interact and express themselves differently than I do. I try to ensure I don’t talk over or dismiss the opinions of anyone, but certainly women.

I’ve been on panels and at events where few, if any, woman are speaking, and I do try to find ways to support others when I can. I also try to be aware of situations where others may feel unsafe and offer to help.

Mostly, I think the best way to be a better community member to women or minorities is to just be professional. We would assume a new employee at our organization was competent and deserved to be there until they prove otherwise. Just do the same thing for anyone you meet at an event and try to let go of biases and preconceived notions.

March 3, 2020
Setting 2020 Learning Goals
I deliberately didn’t set any goals at the start of 2020 since I was taking six weeks off for a sabbatical. That’s done, and it’s time to look forward.

I know I have a few things that will be important for work. Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL will be on the list as we expand and try to sell more database development tools. We’re also working hard on improving SQL Monitor, so finding a way to improve me query tuning, analysis, and monitoring skills will exist.

The goals I want to set here will be more personal goals that may relate to my career, but they’ll not necessarily be things I do at work. I’ll carve out some time elsewhere to get through these.

Reading

I like reading, and do a lot of us to escape and relax. I completed around 120 books last year, but almost all were fictional or non-technology books. I had hoped to get through 6 tech books, but that didn’t work.

This year I’m going to scale back and tackle this in two ways. First, I want to get through at least 3 tech books that relate to specific coding or other skills. I’ve still got a couple from last year, including a Power BI one, so that’s one goal.

The other one will be 2 career related tech books. I started Making Work Visible, and I need to finish that, along with another one.

Goal:
- 3 technical books
- 2 non-tech, related books
Projects

I do a lot of demo stuff and build lots of PoC type things, but I need a couple projects. Specifically, I want to get projects done that will help at work, but will be useful in some way to me, or perhaps even others. With that in mind, and dovetailing slightly with those items above, I want to tackle these three projects and get them in a somewhat useable state:
- A Power BI report that updates from a database
- A mobile app reading data from somewhere
- A website that showcases changes and data from a database.
Not big projects, but getting something organized and relearning some tech about reporting and coding is important to me. I have a few rough ideas for which topics to use for these, but I want to try some basic PoC and see how things go.

Checking In

I think I need to check in monthly with these goals and start to see how I’m making progress. I’ll set reminders weekly to spend time here and then monthly to update some stats on where I am.

I think this feels slightly ambitious, but we’ll see how 2020 goes. Hopefully better than 2019.
March 2, 2020
Reviewing 2019 Career Goals

According to this post, I rate 2019 as a Failure. Of the books I planned to read, I read 2. I started 2 others, but they’re in progress, even right now.

This post is a look at what happened and why, along with a few ideas on what to do better in 2020. Look for the new goal post next week.

The Challenges of 2019

This is really a set of excuses, or at least it sounds that way to me. Ultimately, I just didn’t focus on my career very well. I’m somewhat hoping that doesn’t matter, but I’ve tried to live by “hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

I started out strong with my reading, going through these books 3-4 times a week at night, practicing with some code. It was a nice break after work or after the gym to learn something. Despite coaching and being busy with my family, I was making progress.

That failed in March for a couple reasons. One, I was struggling with a project in my life that needed time and two, I committed to deliver some content for another vendor. Those items created a lot of stress, and reduced the energy I had for career time outside of work.

Add to that the amount of travel I did in 2019. I spent a lot of time on planes, going over 140,000 miles from April to November. While one would think that sitting on a plane is a good time to read, it’s not a good time to learn for me. For a number of these topics, I need to be in front of a PC, and often on a plane, I don’t. I want to relax and escape. If I work, it’s because I need to, and then I’m writing or reviewing something for work.

I had planned to skip a few months of reading work, and even wrote about this. However, I never got back to this and I got used to dismissing my reminders to check goals. That was a mistake on my part.

I also got distracted with other technologies, doing more work with containers last year, which is OK, but it wasn’t part of my plan, and more importantly, I didn’t update the plan.

Doing Better in the Future

How can I do better in 2020? That really starts for me this week, with my return from a sabbatical.

First, I need to keep a plan handy. This year, I’m going to put the plan in my reminder appointment, and that way I can review it each time the reminder comes up. I’ll also be able to adjust it and write a post that reflects the updates.

That’s the second thing. Each update needs to include the plan and progress indicators. I’ll do that, if for no other reason than to understand where I am. I don’t mind not making the goals, but I want to know and decide to not make them for good reasons.

I also need to account for the fact that I am a busy person and some portion of my schedule is out of my hands. I think aiming for 4 books a year is realistic for me, with 6 being the likely goal. I do get busy, and I realize that part of why I love reading is that it takes me away from life. I need to account for the need to spend time reading non-technical books.

I also think I need to better think about the things I do outside of work and career. I have a lot of interests, and those things need time. That means less learning for me.

I also think about the need to cement some of this learning in other areas, so I’d like to actually add in some project work that uses skills I’ll work on. I think that’s important, and like many of you, my work doesn’t always give me the chance to use new skills. To ensure I do capture some learning, I likely need to actually build something.

I’m not sure how things will go, but I plan on creating goals now and then writing an update every month.

February 28, 2020
Schema Filtering in SQL Prompt

I love SQL Prompt, and I’m regularly impressed by the enhancements our teams continue to make in the product. One item that I found interesting recently was schema filtering. This post takes a quick look at this feature.

If I go to look for an object, intellisense is amazing. In this case, I’ll type “SSF <tab> cust”. I’ll see this:

There is the customer table first, and as we see on the right, this is the dbo.customer table. Below this, we see there is a Customer table in the ETL schema and two CustomerLoad tables, which are in two different schemas.

I might actually be working in one of those schemas. Let’s say I’m an ETL developer. I don’t want to accidentally be coding against dbo.Customer when I want to use ETL.Customer. Certainly I might need each one, but in this case, I might just care about loading stuff into the ETL schema and want to work there.

I can add filtering in SQL Prompt by going to the Options and then the Connections section. As you can see below, I have a drop down for schemas.

The default is all schemas, in all databases, but I can change this. I can set a filter. In this case, I’ll choose the “Only load…” option. When I do this, I see a generic wildcard here.

I see schemas for all servers and databases. However, I can set filtering for a specific server and database. Or a database on all servers, or certain servers, but all databases. Here I’ll just edit the schema.

This will change behavior to only show the ETL schema in all databases on all servers. Now when I type the same thing, I see the ETL schema objects only.

Good, right? Plus, the refreshes and loads are faster. The downside here is that in another database, I see no tables.

I can fix this, and just look in that one database by entering the database name. I’d suggest you set this by server and database, just so you are clear what behavior is happening, but it’s up to you.

This was a request from developers that do work in some large schemas, and only want to see those objects. It’s been added to SQL Prompt, so update today, upgrade, or download a trial and give it a try.

February 27, 2020