New Year’s Task: Quick, Easy Prep for a Raise
You’re busy, so I’ll keep this short.
Several months from now, you’re gonna have a salary review. Your manager is going to ask what you’ve been up to, and you’re not going to have a lot of great answers. Copilot isn’t tracking your successes for you.
To help Future You™, take a moment to log sp_Blitz to a table in the master database right now:
|
1 2 3 |
sp_Blitz @OutputDatabaseName = 'master', @OutputSchemaName = 'dbo', @OutputTableName = 'BlitzResults' |
Then select the data back out just to see what you’re dealing with:
|
1 2 |
SELECT * FROM master.dbo.BlitzResults ORDER BY CheckDate, Priority; |
Several months from now, when your manager asks what you’ve been doing, run sp_Blitz to table again, and compare the two sets of results. Any warning that appeared in January, that no longer appears later, means you’ve improved the server. Count up those results and present ’em to management to show how much better/safer/faster you’ve made the environment.
That’s It! Go Do It.
But there are going to be a few inevitable comments, so lemme head off some of them.
“But I heard tables in master are bad!” They are in the sense that if something goes wrong with the server, or you fail over somewhere else, you’re not going to recover the contents of those tables. In this case, I don’t care. If we lose the whole server, well, comparisons between the old one and new one aren’t really relevant.
“But I wanna put it in a different database!” Okay, do that. I don’t care where you stick it. Let your freak flag fly.
“But I wanna centralize the data.” You’ll notice that the output table results include a server name, and you can use that to put data from multiple servers into the same table. Doing that is left as an exercise for the reader.
“But I wanna automate this.” Sure, schedule a job to run every month or quarter, whatever corresponds best to your HR schedules, outages, uptime, whatever. Some people schedule it for SQL Server Agent startup.
“But I’m in Azure SQL DB, and I don’t have Agent jobs.” Well, if you’re a production DBA, and your data lives in Azure SQL DB, I’m gonna save you a little time: your annual review at this company isn’t going to go well for long. You probably wanna start shifting your career into a different type of DBA.
3 Comments. Leave new
I think you should be a little more explicit here in step two.
– Sidney Harris
If you are not doing that already – That’s a REALLY good (and totally free) advice!
Shedule and centralize your sp_blitz was the most valuable tool at my last job where I stared my dba career when I had no idea how healthy all the servers were that I was suddenly responsible for.
Thanks Brent, you made my work easier and more enjoyable.