28Jul 2015 by Grant Fritchey 16 Comments

Grant’s Fly-by-night Leadership Course – The Plan

Professional Development
Get a better name Define my personal goals for the course I won’t be sharing these with you. I may share them with my Inner Circle (defined below). I’m thinking this is a 2-3 year commitment I’m making. I need to have my own set of measurements to ensure that this will be worth the time and effort that I’m putting into it. Define a set of principles and goals for the course I want this course to have meaningful aim. It’s not, absolutely not, about management. Management and Leadership are two different things. This is about being a leader. It must have a purpose. The goals defined here, and like everything else, subject to change over time, will set the tone for each of the other choices. Here's another…
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13Jul 2015 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

How Do You Know You’re Good At Your Job?

Professional Development
You've been working as a DBA for X number of years. How do you know you're good at it? Heck, you've been doing any sort of job for a while. How can you measure whether or not you're competent? The single best measure isn't how much work you do, your accomplishments, the number of databases designed, whatever measure you have. That's not it. The real measure, the one that counts, how do you perform when everything goes south? When that server goes offline or that database develops corruption or that SSIS package fails or, heck, you get a request to fix something that's broken, even non-technical stuff like an incorrect W-2 form (fighting this battle currently)? Did you run around like your hair was on fire? Did you sit there…
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03Jul 2015 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month: June 2015

Professional Development
With my travel schedule, I don't always get out to events where I can see a community speaker. Sometimes, I just see pros. That's the case this month. Instead of skipping the month entirely, which feels wrong, I've decided to do a special award. Speaker of the Month for June 2015 are all the speakers (except me) on SQL Cruise Mediterranean 2015. I've said it before and I don't mind repeating myself, SQL Cruise changes people's careers. There are a lot of reasons for this. The number one reason is all the work that Tim & Amy Ford do to put together the cruise, create the itinerary, ensure plenty of structured and unstructured time on the boat to ensure intense interaction, and all the rest of the stuff that they…
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30Jun 2015 by Grant Fritchey 41 Comments

Leadership Training Possibility

Professional Development
I know a few people in the SQL Server community who have been involved in Scouting. A couple of them have taken or helped lead Scoutings leadership training program known as Wood Badge. It's an amazing program. I won't even attempt to tell you what Wood Badge has done for me and what it does for Scouting. Suffice to say, Wood Badge helped to make me a better person and in return, I helped make Scouting better. What's this have to do with SQL Server? Not much really. But, what does it have to do with you and your career? Tons. It was pointed out to me that there's an Oracle users group that actually runs a leadership program. You can read about it here. It strikes me that, maybe this…
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19May 2015 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Book Review: Connected

Professional Development
I heard about Connected from a show on NPR (Yes, I listen to NPR, why do people keep saying that?). It was right after another segment talking about how positivity affects your mood and your ability to think and act in a clear fashion. I've long been a believer in the ability of your network to impact you, but I really didn't think about it beyond that. Hearing about the book Connected changed my thinking, so I ran out (meaning, connected to Amazon) and got a copy. The premise of the book is pretty simple. You have close friends and acquaintances. Your close friends and acquaintances also have friends and acquaintances, that may or may not over lap with yours. Those people also have another set of friends and acquaintances.…
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01May 2015 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Speaker of the Month: May 2015

Professional Development
I finally got out to some community events last month and got to see a bunch of great speakers. Not that you don't see great speakers at paid events, you do. It's just that they're usually professional speakers and I want to encourage others when I can. The Speaker of the Month for May 2015 is John Sterrett (b|t) and his presentation Automate Your Daily Checklist With PBM and CMS at SQL Saturday Boston. The very first thing that impressed me about this presentation was how John entered the room and immediately started interacting with the attendees. You see a lot of speakers hiding behind the lectern, fiddling with cables, nervously sipping water. Not John. He was chatting as he set up, immediately getting control of the room. It's a great…
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27Apr 2015 by Grant Fritchey 20 Comments

Benefits for Some, All or Only a Few

PASS, Professional Development
As a member of the PASS Board of Directors I attended the PASS Business Analytics Conference (BAC) recently. You can read more about it here and here (as well as here). Let me start with an important note: I am voicing my opinion here as an individual, not an official stance of the PASS organization. There is controversy around the BAC because of a whole bunch of things, but one question in particular bothered me. It was suggested that the people attending the BAC were just consuming the worth or value that other people who paid for the Summit generated. At first, I just dismissed this concept. It stuck in the back of my mind though. Suddenly I realized why. Yes, the BAC was partly paid for by Summit. The…
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10Apr 2015 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

I Am Grateful For

Professional Development
I decided in January that I would write regularly about people that I'm grateful for. Now it's April. Oops. The concepts are simple and science based. Positive emotions help your clarity of thought. Further, your moods and actions extend out through your network to the third layer. With that in mind, I want to think more clearly and the most direct path to positive thoughts and emotions being gratitude, I'm attempting to focus and publicize my gratitude by publicly sharing it through these blogs (in short, I'm trying to tune my brain like I would tune a query). I am grateful for Tim Ford (b|t). Tim is a great guy. Further, Tim can be patient with thick headed dorks (raising my hand). For example, among all the other stuff Tim does…
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03Apr 2015 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month: April 2015

Professional Development
One of my favorite events of the year is the SQL Saturday in Silicon Valley. They've had four of them and I've gone to three (had to miss last year, scheduling conflict). It's a fantastic event and Mark Ginnebaugh (b|t) does a great job putting it together. In fact, this year, we got to listen to Ross Mistry and T.K. Rengarajan have a "fireside chat" for the keynote. For those who don't know, Mr. Rengarajan is just a VP at Microsoft. Yeah, he simply runs the ENTIRE FLIPPING AZURE DATA PLATFORM. That's all. They had a few demos and showed us unreleased code and new versions of SSMS not yet available publicly (including functionality around Query Store and execution plans, my little heart was going pitter-pat). Anyway, if you missed it, you…
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16Mar 2015 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

How To Speak At SQL Saturday Events

PASS, Professional Development
The PASS SQL Saturday events are meant to be a place to grow the pool of speakers, provide a mechanism for the speakers to learn, and fulfill the PASS goals of Connect, Share and Learn. So, you've decided you want to start speaking at a SQL Saturday event. Cool. You went to the <Insert Large, Popular, SQL Saturday> event last year, so you submitted this year... and didn't get accepted. Now what? First, submit. You won't get accepted if you don't try. SQL Saturday, especially the big, popular ones, may not be the best place to present for your very first time. In fact, with the large ones, you may not get accepted because people who already have a reputation are submitting to those (we all want to talk to big…
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