I took the MCM test today, and finished it. I needed the time allotted and it was, well, an experience.
I’m glad it’s done as I have a number of other things to work on. I’ll get results in a few weeks and in the meantime, I’ll get permission to see what I can write about the experience.
At least not completely. There are some functions in SQL Server that are built on the SQL CLR, and even if you have disabled the CLR for user written code, it still loads app domains and functions for system code.
An example of this is the spatial data type. It’s a SQL CLR written user defined data type, but written by Microsoft. If you create a spatial variable, the SQL CLR loads an app domain and code for the UDT using spatial data.
Not a big problem, and not a security risk from my standpoint, but it is worth knowing if you have to debug into memory or some detailed traces/events and see the SQL CLR loading. Don’t panic, and understand that you can’t prevent this from loading for these system objects.
I take the MCM test on Friday. I’ve been watching videos and reading white papers and blogs for the last few weeks and I know that I don’t necessarily know enough. To some extent I have an advantage since I test well on multiple choice tests and I have a broad set of knowledge for SQL Server.
But I don’t know enough. The more I study, the more it becomes painfully clear how much more there is to SQL Server that I don’t understand. Each day I learn something new, but I also learn that there are things I wasn’t aware of
Often, I find that things I just learned are things that friends already know. The thing that gives me some hope is that they will learn something and tell me, not realizing I already know about it.
We all have these uneven holes of knowledge, and just because we do, or don’t, know about feature X, doesn’t mean that we don’t know a lot about feature Y. We have un-evenly learned SQL Server since there isn’t a set path on which to learn.
So I’m nervous, just because it’s a measure of my skill, not because it matters to my career. It will give me a benchmark, and a place from which I can make a plan for how much more I want to learn about SQL Server, and in which areas to work.
It’s President’s Day in the US, and technically a holiday for me (I think). Hard to tell since my company is a UK company and the holidays get a little weird for me. However it’s a holiday for my wife and kids, so I’ll take part of the day off.
I do have some things to do, and a ton of messages piled up from vacation, so I need to go through things a bit and get some things done for tomorrow.
Strange to be back, after being gone for a week and mostly unwired. I took my laptop and checked some email, thinking I might work and write a bit, but didn’t. I did get some MCM studying done, so it wasn’t a complete sit-by-the-pool-and-drink-fest, but not as much as I might have liked. Some notes, and some good questions to run on SQLServerCentral as the Question of the day.
Voice of the DBA 