Looking Ahead to 2011

By Airborne Geek on December 28, 2010

For as much as I write tasks/to-do items down, am unhappy when I don’t get things done on-time, and really enjoy learning and doing new things, lists of Goals sure rub me the wrong way!

2011 Task

Just don't call them "goals"

I’ve always been that way and I haven’t been able to figure out what my deal is. At first, I thought it was the idea of someone else dictating to me what I should do, but I feel this way when I cook up “goals” for myself, too. It’s not being adverse to work, because when it’s fun, it doesn’t matter. Fortunately, just about everything related to IT that isn’t writing .NET code is fun to me, so it’s not that, either.

If nothing else, I at least understand that I’m in the minority here, and can play along at work (err, “play along” sounds a lot more negative than I mean it to be) and understand that Goals make the world go ‘round. I’ll fill out the tool, put them on my Task list for myself (maybe even put “Goals” in the name), and everyone will be happy at the end of the day.

At any rate, since this can’t be a “goals” post ( 😉 ), it’s just going to be some random mumblings about where I want to go next year.

2011: The last full year

OK, I don’t really think the world is going to end in 2012, because No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition! and Mathew 24:36. You’re right, that was dumb. Let me try again.

2011: I pick a direction and [maybe] stick to it

The biggest thing coming up next year for me is career-related.

The whole reason I switched from being a Sysadmin to this DBA thing is because of Business Intelligence. I’m doing the plain-Jane DBA partly because it was there and partly because I saw it as a way to get my foot in the door of “real” data land. For the most part, that has worked out quite well, and, as it turns out, I like doing this full-time, too!

What this means is I need to decide which way I want to go with my life: Do I want to stay a full-time DBA or do what I can to follow what SQLChicken (blog | @SQLChicken) has done, and switch over to full-time BI work (he actually reminded me the other night that Pragmatic Works is hiring, but I said that the travel wouldn’t work for me. On the other hand, if I could drive or fly a little airplane around TN, then we’d need to talk 😀 )? There’s the potential for a heavy BI opportunity at my current job, but I don’t yet know how that is going to play out. It might be a good way to test the waters a bit, but I won’t know that for at least a month or two.

Regardless of how that goes, I need to get some new things going on job-wise soon, because I’m so over SQL 2000, I don’t even know what to say about it.

Other Data Stuff

SQL-related travel is something that we should be doing more of. Neither one of us has a very good (ie, all but nonexistent) travel budget at work, so we have to foot the bill for this on our own. Yes, we know.

We couldn’t swing PASS this year, and that wasn’t any fun. I’ve got SQL Rally on the calendar, but that still remains to be seen. It would be much easier for us to pull off, plus can easily be driven to (we’re done flying Part 121 ops for right now, thanks to the TSA). There are some SQL Saturdays that aren’t terrible to get to, and those are, of course, good events in their own right.

The biggest problem we have with travel these days (and this goes for all travel, not just SQL travel) at the moment is the dogs, since we haven’t been able to figure out what to do with them since moving down here. Taking them along is almost impossible (lodging at destination), and Boarding them at a place that doesn’t just leave them in crates all day gets real expensive real fast. We could get an RV, I guess, but we’d quickly become that couple at events, hahahaha. Still working on this.

Next year, I want to do more experimentation/exploration/goofy stuff with SQL Server at home. I’ve got a couple instances running now, but I’d like to branch into playing with pre-release stuff. This would be easier with a hardware budget, but I’m pushing that envelope as it is, already. Part of what’s holding me back in this department right now, is the simple fact that I don’t really know what to do with myself if I don’t have big DBs with a lot of users hitting them really making things work. Basically, I don’t function well when I don’t have a problem to solve :-)…I’m going to work on either fixing that next year or figure out a way around it.

Big Bookmark, Skinny Book

I'm going to have bookmark problems

I’m going to try to read more next year. I have no idea how I’m going to pull this off, because I read stupidly slow, so it takes me forever to get through anything. I’ve cleaned up my backlog of SQLServerCentral dailies so they’re not so overwhelming, and cutting my losses on some older SQL books that I haven’t made it through. I don’t think I can do anything about my blog feeds, because so many of you guys out there write good and useful content (unlike me).

I hope to get a quick win on the book front by reading Tom LaRock’s (blog | @SQLRockstar) book, since it’s thinner than pretty much everything else I have around here. In fact, it might be a little too thin (see pic). I’m hoping that a quick win there will help me build some momentum. Maybe I’ll magically be able to read faster, too.

Other/Misc

The first other topic is this Blog. I need to spend more time and effort on it, especially when it comes to writing good technical content. So far, I haven’t done a good job at that. That’s partially due to my job situation, but I could be doing more anyway. I hate setting arbitrary numerical goals, but I think I’m going to do it here: 26 posts. That’s an average of one every two weeks, and I should be able to pull that off. I’m not going to get overly detailed and say that “20 of them need to have good technical content”, I’m only going to go for an overall number.

I used to bicycle a fair amount. It hasn’t been the same since I was in college, where I put 30-35 miles a week on the bike just going to class & work. Back then I did a fair amount of mountain biking, too (which is what I’m really in it for), and spent a couple years running races in the Indiana statewide series, DINO. The last few years have been really lacking in that department, both causing and exacerbated by me being fat.

Next year, going to fix that & spend more time on the bike. I’ve already started to do some work on the trainer, and when it warms up, I’m going to move it to the road around the house. We live almost as far away from good bike trails as we did in IN, but I’m going to make an effort to not let that be in my way as much as it has been in the past.

This talk of biking has made me realize that I’m going to need some form of case or other padding for my new phone. The one time I went on a trail this year saw me doing an awesome, completely unintentional half backflip on the bike. I wound up flat on my back, still clipped into the pedals, holding the bicycle up in the air above me. The problem is that I carry my phone in my Camelbak; although the old Samsung i760 lived through that without a problem, I’m pretty sure the Focus would be broken in half. Soooo, need to do something about that.

My Non-Y2K-Compliant Logbook

My Non-Y2K-Compliant Logbook

The final thing for next year is flying. I got my Logbook out recently and thumbed through it. There’s some good stuff in there. The last time I flew was February 2005. I don’t even have the tail number of the airplane or the hours of the last two flights. Just have the landings (2 for one, 1 for the other). I know they were both in one/some of the Skyhawks at Lafayette Aviation, Tammy was with me for one of them, and I had to wait to take off on the single landing one because the visibility was crap**.

Anyway, since then, I’ve waffled back-and-forth between missing flying and being OK with how things are, because flying is freakin’ expensive. But, with the TSA thing and me more and more wanting to get back into it, I want to start flying again next year if I can find the money for it. This does mean that I am supposed to work on my Instrument rating (so I can fly in the clouds, basically), because I promised myself that a number of years ago. So… there’s the last thing for next year: Get Instrument Ticket if I can find the room in the budget.

There we are. 2011. Please don’t hold me to this stuff, because, you know, they’re not goals; just stuff I want to get done 😀

**That one was actually sorta fun, because it was late in the afternoon and the visibility was crap due to a fairly dense haze layer. We finally took off (oh hey, this is the one with Tammy. This means she was only with me for one landing. Hahaha, stay tuned for awesome stories.), flew around the pattern, annnnd then turned final, which happened to be directly into the sun. Bam, couldn’t see anything. I mean, seriously, in-flight visibility was maybe 1/2 mile, and I was on a mile final. I grumped about this to the controller as I flew runway heading, knowing that it would eventually show up ahead, and he was all, “Yeah, the last guy said it was pretty bad.” Yeah, thanks for the heads-up, pal.

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Here Be Dragons: New Cell Phone

By Airborne Geek on November 30, 2010

Cell phones in my family go way back…Pretty much as far back as is possible in the US:

Ameritech Phone

1984 called...

I don’t remember anymore if that was my dad’s first or second phone. I have no idea what the deal with the ammo box is. I do remember that the handset clip would get bolted to that little bracket on the lid & then could leave the box sit in the middle floor of his pickup and the phone would be right there. Yeah. AMPS analog. 3 watt transmitter. Good thing the antenna was on the roof. Those were the early Ameritech days. The phone wouldn’t even get a signal at the house—he had to get up towards Rensselaer (Indiana, look at a map, see the boondocks where I’m from) before he’d be able to use the thing.

‘Course, back then everyone called them “car phones.” It stayed in the car, and at one point was even hardwired to the vehicle so that if he wasn’t in the truck at the time, it would honk the horn if someone rang. That seems almost mind-blowing to me now. Once the whole 3 watt thing started to go away, things got smaller, and they started to come in little nylon bags (“bag phones”) that were more self-contained, and at least had little rubber duck antennas directly attached to them. It was on a BNC connector, so you could plug in the roof antenna if you didn’t like having what was probably still a whole watt radio broadcasting from the general vicinity of your right knee.

Anyway, in the mid-90s, I was assigned a Motorola DPC 650 by my parents when I started to drive (found out that Tammy had a 650 at about the same time I did). That thing was still a beast, and pretty much never left the truck. That phone began my love affair with Motorola flip phones served by our old friend GTE Communications. Through high school I went through a number of StarTAC 7860 and -68s (wore the phone, so broke a lot of antennas and other bad things happened). To this day, I sometimes wish for the simplicity of a StarTAC.

In summer of 2000, while I was in college, I got my own account and number with GTE. That brought the horrid piece of crap that was the T720. I don’t even want to talk about it. Still have the phone though; it’s pretty funny to fire it up and look at it now. It had a one-line display on the outside so you could see who was calling (OOOOO!). I also seem to recall you could install 3rd party applications on it, but I don’t remember much about that. Somewhere in here GTE became Verizon, of course. I can still hear James Earl Jones say, “Welcome to Verizon Wirelesssss…”

Things looked up after that: Motorola V710. This thing is honestly probably my favorite phone of all time. It was solid, its radio was great, and had ridiculously awesome call quality. It had a big display on the inside, a decent-sized one on the outside, and really good battery life. My first one of those met an untimely end when I wound up running over it with my pickup. While it was open. Face down. Did I mention that it was just at the right place that the front right tire of the pickup sat ON the phone for a few hours? The fun thing about that is that the phone still worked (!), and I used it like that for a few weeks before it decided it was done. Yay phone insurance!

The Smartphone Years

Because I was addicted to my job at the time, and liked the idea of getting mail in my pocket, I bought a Samsung i760 in December 2007. That is a Windows Mobile 6.1 device with a slide-out keyboard. I bought that phone because I wanted my phone to be just another Outlook client. I didn’t want to have to fight with some third-party Exchange connector and Blackberries were right out from the get-go. I have a giant rant about RIM and how I cannot comprehend how so many companies rely on their system for mail, but that’s a different story.

This was a big departure for me for a couple reasons: It was the first non-Motorola flip phone that I had ever owned, as was it my first smartphone. I was pretty worried about this at the time. As it turned out, though, everything was great. OK, except for the call quality. This was definitely a smartphone first. The radio wasn’t all that good, either. However, within about 10 minutes of having it home, I was scrolling (with its stylus, hahahaha) through my Exchange mailbox, which I thought was the coolest thing since sliced bread at the time. You know what else I liked about the phone? Windows Mobile 6.1. There, I said it.

Three years later, I jump off a cliff…

After ten years with the same Verizon account, phone number, and I’m quite certain, voicemail message… I switched to the company that carries Ma Bell’s bastardized name and a completely unproven phone OS on a device that doesn’t have a hardware keyboard. This could go terribly.

Yes, I bought a Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7. Tammy and I both got one (ATT BOGO Black Friday deal). This was brought on by our house (The Osburn Hideaway) being in a bizzaro black hole where there is no Verizon coverage, Tammy and I wanting to combine to a family plan, and, well, ATT having WP7. Because at the end of the day, I’m just that big of a fanboi.

Everyone on Twitter knows that BrentO just loves Windows Phone 7. I do agree with just about everything that he says about it. We’re taking huge gambles that someone at Microsoft has this dev team’s throttle on the floor and all of the shortcomings the device has will be taken care of soon (I’m not going to talk about anything specific, because I have the same grumps that everyone else has, and all of those people are better writers than I am). The rumored sales numbers don’t look all that good so far, but I don’t know that anyone is all that surprised by that. If, after the first major update comes out and possibly another round of hardware, those numbers don’t start to go up…then I’m going to be pretty worried. I don’t expect iPhone-like numbers, as that device changed the freaking world, and it’s the likely-not-to-be-beaten incumbent.

So, that’s my cell phone story. I don’t expect to write about this much more, because like I said above, I’m really not smart enough to come up with anything new here on my own, so you’ll be able to see what I’m going through by everyone else writing about the OS and poo-pooing on its poor adoption rate. I mean, unless something really bad happens and I bail early.

…and if this doesn’t work out and that happens, I’ll… <deep breath>…probably get an iPhone.

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T-SQL Tuesday #12: Why are DBA Skills Necessary?

By Airborne Geek on November 2, 2010

TSQL Tuesday 12

T-SQL Tuesday #12 hosted by Paul Randal

T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted this month by the great Paul Randal (blog | @PaulRandal). This is awesome, because it’s Paul, but also not so awesome, because it means Paul is guaranteed to read my stuff. I’m not nervous about this at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

I had a couple ideas for this, and if I had gotten started on this sooner, I probably would have written two different posts. Too many things didn’t work out right for that, so there’s only this one. Hopefully I didn’t choose poorly. Here we go…

So…Why are DBA skills necessary?

Well…because they are!

I mean… Are car mechanic skills necessary? Are pilot skills necessary? Are business skills necessary?

OK, you’re right, it depends. It depends on if you’re planning on rebuilding a Rochester carburetor and having the engine idle afterwards. Or landing a 747 on an actual runway and not bending anything. Or being the CEO of a multinational company and it continue to grow, prosper, and make money.

I don’t think those are extreme examples. Just like the above, if you want to build, support, and continue to improve a highly available, scalable, and performing database system, you need DBA skills to make that happen. Sure, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might get lucky and find a washer in the carb’s air horn that had locked the air valves on the secondary bores closed, the removal of which led to unprecedented quantities of burning gasoline, but you can’t run on luck forever.

But…Why?

All these things are hard. I know that rebuilding a Quadrajet is hard, because those things are a pain in the ass. I know that landing a 747 is hard, because it’s a giant airplane that isn’t slow and might have lots of people in the back. OK, technically I don’t know that it’s hard to run a multinational corporation, but I’m pretty sure it is.

Know what else is hard? Databases. Databases are hard.

This isn’t about platforms or anything like that. Databases are hard when they’re Oracle DBs or when they’re mySQL DBs. Databases are hard when they’re Access “databases”, although in a different way (and in a way that’s not hard if your name is Brent Ozar).

OK, why are databases hard?

They require concentration. They require a wide range of technical skills from all parts of IT to accomplish successfully. They require you to know where to look and who to ask when there are things that you don’t know. They require being able to deal with the pressure put on you when things aren’t going right.

Perhaps more so than other areas of IT, when things aren’t going right, lots of people aren’t happy. Databases contain one of the most important assets of their owners: their data. Having this data safe and available in a timely fashion is a requirement if that data is going to be useful at all. Being able to troubleshoot and fix problems while juggling those unhappy people isn’t always an easy task.

Databases are hard because there are a lot of places for things to go wrong, and a DBA needs to be able to deal with all of those. There’s data modeling, which can cause never-ending problems when done incorrectly. There are server administration tasks, which can have fundamental performance impacts. There is a need for security skills to keep that all-important data safe from all kinds of bad guys. The list goes on.

Why is this point missed?

I don’t know. Wish I did, pretty sure I could make a lot of money 😉

The problem isn’t with us. For the most part, IT folks already know that DB work is hard. We don’t need to convince ourselves. All manner of IT management and/or business owners need to know that DB work is hard, just like most other forms of IT work. This is where the problem is.

It seems like DBs get short-changed a lot, doesn’t it? When things start out, the little Access DB works fine for the few users that there are. As the business grows, either a Dev or Sysadmin that knows a bit about what they’re doing gets a hold of a SQL Server license and migrate the system over. This is completely fine for small to even medium-sized shops. Hardware and SQL itself will run really well out of the box for the vast majority of applications out there.

The problem is when you cross that line. The above-mentioned migrated Access app will run fine for probably a long time, but the next thing anyone knows, it’s five years down the road and the blocking is so bad in the poorly designed & maintained database that the users just know to get coffee across the street when they’re doing certain tasks because it’s going to be a while.

Pain like that can be avoided by having those DBA skills around from the very beginning. They don’t have to be FTEs. They don’t even need to be dedicated resources. They are, however, necessary skills, and every business that has a database (that should be a pretty high percentage) should have someone available to take care of these tasks at least on a part-time basis, even if it’s that Sysadmin who wants to learn the right way to do at least a few things.

Business owners might not think they need to spend the money now, and that very possibly may be correct. However, if they don’t, they need to at least know that the need will be coming someday. It’s only going to be more expensive later, and hopefully that day won’t be a time when a disk has died and the backup job hasn’t been working properly for three weeks 🙁

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Unbeknownst to them, Soutwest has a SQL Saturday hookup!

By Airborne Geek on October 27, 2010

Being the Southwest fanbois that we are, I wanted to bring y’all this PSA 🙂

Winglet!

Everyone loves winglets. OK, maybe not everyone.

They’ve got a sale going on until the end of October 28 (tomorrow) Pacific Time where you can get flights for $30 if you’re going < 450 miles. They go up from there, but the prices are still pretty good.

The windows for the flights are December 1-15 and January 4-February 16. There are FIVE (5) whole SQL Saturdays within those two windows!

  • Dec 4, #61 in DC
  • Jan 15, #62 in Tampa
  • Jan 22, #45 in Louisville
  • Jan 29, #57 in Houston
  • Feb 5, #60 in Cleveland

Sooooo, if you’re wanting to hit up more SQL Saturdays or are speaking at one of those and have to foot the bill yourself, this might be a slightly cheaper way to pull it off.

…You know, if you don’t mind being stuffed in the back of a 737-700.

Edit: Forgot to put the direct link to their page that lists all of the covered cities/destinations: clicky

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Time to stare up at the night sky again

By Airborne Geek on September 20, 2010

Well, so this didn’t take long for me to break from writing good, useful SQL posts to drop into general geekery.

Long story short, the Earth is as close as we will be to Jupiter until 2022. This makes it very bright in the night sky. If you go outside and look tonight (which you should), you will see a bright thing in the sky to the Southeast of the Moon. That’s Jupiter.

So, that’s fairly cool. But there’s more!

Get some binoculars and look again. Depending on how good your eyes are and how powerful your binocs are, you will see three or four of Jupiter’s four big “Galilean” moons. They’re running in a plane from lower left to upper right. Won’t be able to see any rings without a telescope, but the moons are pretty cool. At midnight it should be more-or-less overhead, which is when everything will be the brightest & easiest to see.

That's no moon...there's four of them (clicky for big)

The pic I took here was with Tammy’s Pentax K10D on a tripod with the crappy 200mm telephoto that we have. I wasn’t even going to do this until @CanSpice said that he had good results, so out I went. Focus ring doesn’t go far enough over to make this really sharp, so between that and, you know, the whole “we’re moving” part, this is as good as I can get with the equipment we have.

Spaceweather.com has some ridiculous pictures posted from other people who have real equipment, along with some more info.

Uranus (heh*) is also in the vicinity (only one degree off), but I wasn’t able to find it–not enough power. All of us (Sun, Earth, Jupiter, Uranus) are all lined up in a row, which is why everything is so close together.

I would expect that there will be another few nights when Jupiter is really visible, so if you don’t see this tonight, all hope is not completely lost.

* I’m sorry, I still, and probably will always, snicker at this

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