Product has been added to your cart.

Professional Development

Home
Professional Development

How to Get a Junior DBA Job – Part 3

Last Updated April 10, 2017

Professional Development

In the final part of my three-part series on how to get a junior DBA job (Part 1), it’s time to talk about mentoring and training, and how they affect your salary. Ask About Mentoring and Training During the interview, ask how many other database administrators are on the team and what their seniority levels…

How to Get a Junior DBA Job – Part 2

Last Updated April 10, 2017

Professional Development

Yesterday I talked about why companies aren’t hiring junior DBAs, and today I’ll talk about how you can get in the door anyway. Companies are Cheap, and DBAs are Expensive Even in a healthy economy, companies want to get a bargain. They want to hire an experienced senior database administrator for junior DBA wages. They…

How to Get a Junior DBA Job – Part 1

Last Updated April 10, 2017

Professional Development

So you’re hearing all the fun that DBAs are having on Twitter and around the intertubez, and you’re wondering how to get in on the fun. Maybe you’re a developer or a network admin, and you’ve been learning about SQL Server from books and from peers, and you’re starting to look around for your first…

Bloggers: Don’t Focus Too Much on Search Terms

Last Updated February 13, 2017

When blogging, it’s tempting to use your web analytics software to examine what people are searching for, and then build your new blog posts around the search terms people are using. After all, if people are searching for that, it’s a popular topic, so you should write about it, right? Wrong. You already wrote about…

Book Review: The Whuffie Factor

Last Updated February 13, 2017

You, dear reader, probably don’t work in the marketing department. The vast majority of my readers are information technology professionals, and the rest are my family. (Hi, Mom!) Today, you can’t get a job like mine without knowing how whuffie works. In the not-too-distant future, you may not even be able to get a job…

Book Review: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Book Reviews, Execution Plans

My gauge of an amazing book is simple: if I’ve got a question, and I reach for the book BEFORE I search the web, then it’s an amazing book. Several times in the last two weeks, I reached for this book first.

Certifications are the icing on the cake

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Professional Development

Wondering whether or not you should get certified on something? Experience is cake, certifications are the icing. It’s hard to sell icing without cake. Yes, there are some people who like to eat icing by itself, but frankly, those people are freaks. They’re not healthy. Something is wrong with them. If you take an easy-to-get…

Book Review: SQL Server 2008 Administration in Action

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Let’s start with the obvious: yes, there’s a man on the cover smoking something. It’s probably not a coincidence that when I started writing this review, the iTunes Genius started playing Poison’s “Nothin’ But A Good Time.” There’s a reason they call it the Genius, and yes, I do have Poison in my MP3 collection,…

Book Review: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Production database administrators have to know at least a little about a lot of things: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration How to install or upgrade SQL Servers How to build clusters How to plan for disaster recovery and high availability How to do performance tuning How to secure and protect databases The production…

More thoughts on career specialization

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Professional Development

K. Brian Kelley wrote a counterpoint to my recommendation that DBAs should specialize and focus their training. I respect Mr. Kelley a lot: he’s been in the United States Armed Forces. I don’t want to run into him in a dark alley. He’s a nice guy, and he’s got a lot of integrity, but that…

Things you know now…

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Professional Development

Mike Walsh (Twitter, blog) tagged me with a great question today: what do you wish you’d have known when you got started? Oh, where to begin… Pick one thing and get really good at it. Every year, there’s going to be some sexy new technology. Your friends are going to be all over it, and…

Putting ads on your old WordPress posts

Last Updated February 13, 2017

In my series on How to Get Started Blogging, one of the first things I talked about was deciding what you’re blogging for: money, career, or something else. That series focused on blogging for your career, but if you’re interested in going after money, there’s a WordPress plugin that I’ve found helpful. Whydowork AdSense will…

WhiteHouse.gov is not a blog.

Last Updated February 13, 2017

I keep hearing people patting themselves on the back saying, “Look – our President has a blog!” Hmmm. It doesn’t smell like a blog to me because: There’s no comments There’s no trackbacks There’s no personal touch – it’s very, very clearly written by marketers (and certainly not the President himself) If the White House…

Top 10 SQL Server DBA Interview Questions

Last Updated April 10, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Looking for someone with more than a couple years of experience? Here’s how to find out if they’re bluffing. Includes questions like, “I’m a developer – explain why I need a unique key on my table.” Of course, I don’t include the answers – that would make it too easy for people to read this blog and fake it!

Top 10 Questions To Ask During an Interview

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

#SQLPass, Professional Development

Before YOU take a job, here’s what you should ask. Have there been any layoffs in the last year? What’s the on-call policy like? Finding out these answers before it’s too late will save you from taking a really bad job. Believe me – I’ve been there.

Interview Tip: Don’t Stress Out

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Professional Development

I was just talking to a fellow blogger who’s going through an interview process, and we touched on something that bears repeating here. Interviewers don’t always expect you to know the answers. Sometimes they ask you a string of ugly, nasty technical questions that you can’t possibly have seen before. They might not be testing…

About those blogging rules…

Last Updated February 13, 2017

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some guidelines for getting started with technical blogging. I’ve now gone and broke one of them – not editing your WordPress template. When CSS sharpie Jeremiah Peschka read of my desire to make my site span the full width of the page, he offered to give me…

How to Start a Technical Blog, Part 5: Blog Etiquette

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Blogging, Professional Development

Enough with the technical details – let’s talk manners. Give People Credit and Links If you hear about something from somebody else, credit ’em. The internet is huge, SQL Server is huge, and we all get help to find the stuff we need to do our jobs every day. We find stuff through other people,…

How to Start a Technical Blog, Part 4: WordPress Themes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

In my series this week on how to get started blogging, I’ve touched on the business of blogging for yourself, why you should use WordPress and how to configure it, and the best WordPress plugins. Today I’m going to focus on look and feel. WordPress uses a “theme” system to bundle images, CSS files and…

How to Start a Blog

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Blogging, Professional Development, Writing and Presenting

So you’ve been reading blogs for a while, and you want to know how to start a blog. It’s really easy, it pays off long term in your career, and it’s a great way to meet awesome people. I’m going to tell you all the things I wish somebody would have told me way back…

Menu