Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • What is my why?–T-SQL Tuesday #111

    tsqltuesdayThis is an interesting question from Andy Leonard for T-SQL Tuesday: What Is Your “Why”? He is this month’s host and asks us to talk about our motivation, our passion. The question is: Why do you do what you do?

    Why I Do What I Do?

    I have had a great career in technology. Moving from developer to system administrator to developer to manager, and back through various incarnations. I have had success in lots of positions and helped improve systems and code, teaching and mentoring others along the way.

    Almost twenty years ago, I participated in a user group and helped someone solve an issue. That inspired me to start writing articles that detailed how to build solutions that had helped me and my employer. Over time that led to SQLServerCentral and regular speaking and writing.

    My career in databases really started for the money. I worked with a DBA that was better paid than any sysadmin or developer, and began to study and work with SQL Server. As I earned more, I thought I’d made a good decision, but over time I realized that there was a point where money was less important to me.

    Time became the most important thing to me.

    There have been many times where I would have traded more time for less money, though that isn’t quite the case now as I have two children attending college next year. Still, in the middle of my career I wanted to, because of the value that I placed on time with family and friends and living my life.

    I started to give back with writing, speaking, teaching because I had people do that for me, and because I wished I’d had more. I wished that more people had shared solutions and ideas with me earlier in my career.

    I also believe that we fundamentally ought to help others in life when we’ve been helped or been successful. We ought to pay it forward where we can, but more so we need to pay it back. It’s a bit of a social contract with others, a bit of a desire to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and a bit of a moral obligation I feel to help the world because I’ve been blessed with success.

    Everyone walks their own path, makes their own decisions, and follows their own moral code. I try to follow mine, and I hope to inspire others to help others where they can.

    It’s why I do what I do, and I’m lucky that I’m able to do so, both as my job, but also because I am able to help others.

  • Automation for Databases–T-SQL Tuesday #110

    tsqltuesdayThis is the day for T-SQL Tuesday #110, a topic picked by Garry Bargsley. Automation has been a cornerstone of most of my career. As much as I work hard, and don’t mind putting time and effort into accomplishing tedious work, I also know that automation makes my life much, much easier.

    And me a far more productive employee.

    Automation is king, so here’s one place I’ve used this in the past.

    Complying with Standards

    One of the big items auditors want to have is proof that this thing happened or didn’t happen. That an employee actually performed some action, with some proof. At one point, we were being audited and I was asked if we checked that all backups were running for all databases.

    Of course, most backups worked, some failed,  and we were aware. More importantly, I could prove it. In our Exchange Public folders, we had a folder for database actions. In here, for each day, was a report from each database server. If there was a question of compliance for any of our sensitive systems, we could give them a link. More importantly, anytime we ran a remediation, we posted a note and the scripts run for the system. That way any backups that failed and were manually run, or other changes, were logged.

    This was a combination of a T-SQL querying system DMVs and DBMail to send out reports to our public folder (and DBAs). Today, if I needed something similar, I might move to PoSh, but likely lots of this is still easy to accomplish in T-SQL. However, I’d really rather not build any more monitoring systems. Too many things to manage, and my time is better spent.

    Now I’d use SQL Monitor and if anything, build my own reports on top of that infrastructure. That way the data gathering, archiving, etc. isn’t something I need, and I can extract out the text reports for auditors, which they like. Plus, with automation, they know that the system is running as intended.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #109–Influence

    tsqltuesdayThis month’s T-SQL Tuesday host is Jason Brimhall. He asks everyone to write about influence, which is something that I should know about and think I have, but am somewhat uncomfortable writing about.

    That being said, here’s my entry this month.

    Influencing Others

    One of the motivations behind creating SQLServerCentral was to educate and help others. Our goal (Andy, Brian, myself) was to try and find ways that we’d had success, solved problems, or handled challenges and share that with others by writing articles, answering questions, and creating questions for our Question of the Day quiz.

    Across the years as I’ve done that, and I’ve written many editorials, there have been plenty of occasions to meet members of the SQLServerCentral community. Many of them have thanked me or talked about how the site and community made a difference in their careers, which is something I’m quite proud of. Helping others is a form or volunteerism and service, and while this is a vocation for me, it’s also a passion.

    One of the things I think that I’m most proud of us influencing others to also give back and share. I can only do so much, but if I can also convince others to share their knowledge, there is a level of helping and sharing that grows exponentially to everyone in our #SQLFamily. To that end, I have two stories.

    One is about blogging, which I tend to do regularly. I had a friend, someone I met years ago that wanted to start blogging and asked me for some hints and idea. I shared a few things that help me, but also challenged this individual to set a goal for writing. They did, and years later, they have quite a blog. Many of you have heard of this person, but I won’t mention the name here. That’s not important. What is important is they have helped many others and continue to do so today.

    The other story is a person I met at a user group meeting. I was giving a presentation and this individual had some intelligent questions to ask. Over a few meetings, as I talked with this person, I realized they were someone with a lot of talent on the data platform and encouraged them to think about speaking. I did this regularly, and while it took over a year, this person now has spoken at many events, including the PASS Summit.

    It can be scary and intimidating to share knowledge with others publicly, but it is also immensely rewarding and a way of helping others walk the path you have already covered. Perhaps I’ll influence one of you reading today to share some of what you’ve learned with those hungry to learn.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #108

    tsqltuesdayIt’s that time of month, and this is a good topic as it relates to career learning. I’m a big fan of improving your career, so I like this topic. The invitation is from Mala, one of the people I look forward to seeing each year at various events.

    Non SQL Server Tech

    At heart, I’m something of a data person, though I dabble in various other technologies at times. This year, I made it a point to work on learning two new technologies, one of which was outside of SQL Server. Python was what I chose and I ended up spending some time on various Python courses for about 5 months. Then life and work got in the way.

    I still want to spend a bit more time on Python, but I also recognize that I need a new challenge, so I’m going to pick something else for 2019. For me, this will be CosmosDB.

    I think CosmosDB is a neat technology and has some really good things inside of it, but I really don’t know enough about it. I’ve had minor exposure to NoSQL structures, but not really enough to know how well I’d use them for a project.

    The Plan

    For 2019, or at least for the first quarter(ish), I want to port a database from SQL Server to CosmosDB and play with the differences. I have a few sample ones, but I’ve been compiling a database of some SQL Saturday data and want to use that as a test. I’ll work on moving the data to the different CosmosDB structures, likely a document structure and a graph structure, and gain some experience as to how these work.

    I hope to build a simple REST website that accesses these databases, which should also let me compare the differences for data access and note where one structure might work better than the other.

    I’ll set a reminder for the end of each month in 2019 (Jan-Apr) to evaluate where I am.