Professional Development Archives - Page 12 of 16

25Feb 2014 by Grant Fritchey 20 Comments

Approachable? Sometimes.

Deservedly so, I got called out for a bit of attitude I displayed in a recent blog post: Time for a Quick Rant. Steve Hood took the general attitude of "Do this or I will beat you" to task in his blog post The Approachable DBA. Granted, my little rant was primarily done tongue wedged immovably in cheek. But I was reflecting an attitude that the gods know I'm guilty of and that I think way too many DBAs are guilty of. Actually, I think developers are just as guilty. And sysadmins, san admins, support desk people, QA, the report writing team, those people supporting the data warehouse certainly, the SharePoint team, and that poor lady who got stuck being the Deployment manager. That attitude? I don't think you heard…

07Feb 2014 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month, February 2014

Professional Development

I didn't get out to many events in January, so I was somewhat limited in the pool of presenters that I could choose from. Luckily for me, that pool primarily consisted of the entire Caribbean since I was on the SQL Cruise. There I got to see some of the best in the business doing serious teaching (and networking, and water slides, and rum, and beaches, and rum). I could easily cop out, cheat, and name the Cruise as speaker of the month, but I have not yet sunk that low (plus, the rum is gone). Every speaker I saw was great too. Tim Ford doesn't let just anyone present in his watery venue. So, I could pick from any of them and be 100% right. But, I had to…

05Feb 2014 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Book Review: The Phoenix Project

DevOps, Professional Development

Let's get this straight right up front, the thought of reading a novel that's about IT is so repellent, so repugnant, just so horribly wrong, that it's kind of hard to fathom why I would even attempt it. What's even more difficult for me to fathom is how much I enjoyed this book. Which is a novel. About IT. I can't figure it out. Maybe I need to start reading more IT novels... no. Let's hope that's not actually a thing. On with the review... The Phoenix Project is a story about a mid-level manager in a large company who has been running part of the IT organization that is a bit of a backwater, maintaining old big-iron systems, VAX, that type of thing. He gets called into the CEOs…

20Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 35 Comments

Time for a Quick Rant

Professional Development, SQL Server

This is an actual quote from what we can only assume is a functional human being: The database is very big so we stopped taking backup's. Eight lords a leaping are you kidding me? Seriously! Seriously? By the Great Gu and all the Valkyries in Valhalla, you stopped taking backups of your PRODUCTION database because it was "very big." And I'll put down Brobdingnagian stacks of cash that "very big" in this case is probably 200-500gb or at worst 1-2tb. People, assuming you have enough brain stem intact to regulate breathing, you must know, you must by all the sparkly vampires in Twighlight KNOW that you need to have backups. Right? I mean, nothing ever goes wrong on this shiny marble we call Dirt, does it? No one would EVER…

08Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Sausage Making

Professional Development

For those who don't know, I work for Red Gate Software. I'm not a developer, but I work directly for the development teams so I spend a lot of time with them. This week I'm over in the UK, where they are headquartered, meeting with the different teams and discussing our products, their future, issues with them, enhancements, and all the rest. Suffice to say, I'm excited by the future. But the really fun bits are when you see behind the scenes stuff. Red Gate is pretty well known for polished, intelligent, elegant UI design (yes, they keep me away from that stuff). Behind those pretty pictures though is code. And our developers are just like your developers, smart, capable, skilled, but still learning. And it's those learning bits that…

03Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Speaker of the Month, January 2014

Professional Development

A whole new year. Cool. I was at SQL Saturday DC, #233, at the beginning of December. I sat through several really good presentations. I could honestly give the award this month to any of the ones I took notes on, but I have to pick one person (although, not always, my award, my rules). So, speaker of the month for the brand new year is Konstantin Melamud (li|t). Yet another speaker without a blog. Maybe I should enforce my own rules at some at some point. <sigh> Anyway, I enjoyed Konstantin's presentation. Let's talk about it. Performance Tuning - Index Optimization was an excellent presentation. Konstantin came at the topic very carefully. He started off with a knowledge level baseline, right at the start. I thought that was a…

20Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Tribal Awards: Vote Now!

Professional Development

The #tribalawards voting is now online. Get over there and get it done. I honestly don't care who you vote for because that is a great list of wonderful people in every single category. But if I were to pick one category, in which I'm nominated, that I'd like to win, it's Person You'd Like to Have a Beer With. So please at least consider making me happy. Then, next time I'm presenting in your area, we could share a frothy beverage and you can claim credit for my win which will result in my being forced to buy a round. See, it absolutely works out in your favor. But seriously, well, as serious as I can be when one of the categories is Best Karaoke, I think the people…

18Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaking in 2014

Professional Development

I love that I get to travel around and learn from my #sqlfamily. We're still filling in the majority of the 2014 schedule, but the plans are to go to as many events as Mrs. Scary will let me. I'd like to alert you to a couple coming up in January, and then I should be able to get a fuller schedule for the first quarter posted soon (that way you can complain to me in person about Managed Backups). On Friday, January 10th, I'll be presenting a SQL in the City Seminar on Database Deployment in Cambridge, UK. Presenting in the UK is just fantastic. And this is a live event. And it's at the stately Red Gate Towers. Oh, and this is a free event, but seating is…

06Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month, December 2013

Professional Development

This will be my fifth speaker of the month post. Do a search to see the others. I try to find speakers that people may not have heard of who are out there, working hard, doing a good job. But, sometimes, I'm going to see a presentation by someone who is a community speaker, and... well, it just might stand out so much that I don't have a choice but to award them (remember, my contest, my rules, and the rules are utterly arbitrary). The speaker of the month is Ami Levin (b|t). The session I attended at SQL Saturday Dallas was called Physical Join Operators. It was all about hash match, loop and merge joins. Stop yawning. I'm into that sort of thing. What I expected was, hopefully, an…

12Nov 2013 by Grant Fritchey 19 Comments

Cargo Cult Data Professionals

Professional Development

Ever since David Moutray introduced me to the concept of cargo cult programming, it's been running round and round in my head. I'm actually coming to believe that this is a major issue in all walks of life. True or not, we're absolutely seeing it in the data professionals space. Don't believe me? OK. A few questions. Do you work for one of the organizations that absolutely requires NOLOCK on all queries (even INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE)? Why? Because it runs faster? Why don't you just use READ_UNCOMMITTED for your isolation level? What's that? Never heard of isolation levels? I'll bet you also don't know what is meant by "dirty reads" then either. READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT anyone? In short, you're guilty of being in a cargo cult. You've got this form in your head of…

Category: Professional Development