Whew. We've worked through a couple dozen posts together in this DBA Training Plan, and you're still just getting warmed up.
First, pick your specialty. Here's some of the more popular specializations in the SQL Server business:
I'm constantly looking for ways to raise my game, so I made some investments this month to take my video class audio & video to the next level.
I'm now doing green screen effects on the recordings. I picked up an Elgato retractable green screen that mounts to the wall so that I can pull it down when I'm doing a training class, and roll it back up when I'm doing normal client work:
Today's post is for those of you who give presentations to user groups and conferences. Upload your resources before the session starts. When you say "I'll upload the resources later," the attendee hears you saying, "I'm winging this, I barely finished this deck 15 minutes ago, and I didn't even have the time to upload…
What follows are just some of the highlights from an actual job posting. I'm not including the job description, just the requirements that an applicant has to have in order to even throw their hat in the ring: Requires Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. Experience running and maintaining a 24x7 production computing environment Hands-on experience…
You've been writing queries for at least a year or two, and you're curious about what's happening under the hood when SQL Server runs a query. You want to know what you can do to improve your queries, tune your indexes, and change SQL Server's configuration settings so that your results will return faster.
The book Learn T-SQL Querying is for curious people like you.
How much do database administrators, analysts, architects, developers, and data scientists make? We asked, and 882 of you from 46 countries answered this year. Y'all make a total of $84,114,940 USD per year! Hot diggety. (And at first glance, it looks like on average, y'all got raises this year.)
Download the 2019, 2018, & 2017 results in Excel.
Last week, I shared a few pictures out of Ron Soukup's Inside SQL Server 6.5 book. You had a blast with that one, so I figured I'd share some more pictures from another, uh, let's call it "well-preserved" book about SQL Server. Make sure you see the subtitle of this book before you add it to your cart.
30 years ago, back in 1988, Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, and Sybase got together to start building SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2.
I wanted to take a trip down memory lane to celebrate, but I didn't wanna go back quite that far. I wanted to go back to what would probably be fairly recognizable - say, over 20 years ago: SQL Server 6.5 as of 1996.
How much do database administrators, analysts, architects, developers, and data scientists make? We asked, and 3,113 of you from 73 countries answered this year.
Download the 2018 & 2017 results in Excel.
There's no Latin word for Robot
I'm all for automation, especially when it comes to the boring stuff. As awesome as the automation routines we have for that are, I still see people messing it up.
Right now, there's no Clippy/HAL mashup glaring at you, telling you that what you're doing is a bad idea.
The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open now, and you can look at the live responses as they come in. (To get that in Excel, click File, Download.) As of this writing (Dec 23), there's already over 2,500 responses, so I'm going to take a look at a few things to see how it's shaping up.
64% (1,626) of responses are from the United States
Of those, 50% (809) are DBAs (either dev, general, or production focus)
776 use Microsoft SQL Server their primary database
When you're hiring a Junior DBA, ask yourself a few questions:
"What job did they have before this?"
Someone who's currently employed as a Junior DBA isn't looking for another Junior DBA job: they're looking for a Senior DBA job. Because of that, you have to rethink how you write the job description and minimum required qualifications.
Every now and then, clients ask me to interview candidates for their open DBA positions. I get to see a lot of resumes, and there are a few warning signs that pop up regularly. 1. The Keyword Encyclopedia. I get it: you've opened SSMS before, and you clicked on all the options and wizards, and…
Before you get too excited
This isn't a dive into any of the new automated tuning features of SQL Server 2017.
I'm interested in them because Microsoft thinks they can put us out of business with them, but...
Brent says: "How many people are in the on-call rotation with me, and can I give them each a technical test?" Once you get out of the on-call rotation, it's really hard to go back to the electronic tether. I'd be willing to do it, but only if there are other sharp people to share…
I took the data from the 2017 Data Professional Salary Survey, and filtered just for database administrators in the United States. Then, I pivoted it on the two experience questions. First, we'll cover database experience, and then we'll cover job experience.
How many years of experience do you have with this database?
I stopped the analysis at 20 years of experience because the numbers drop dramatically at that point. (Makes sense, SQL Server 7 wasn't even out 20 years ago.)
In this week's episode of our screenshot interview series, you're applying for a database professional position who will be on call. You're not necessarily the DBA, but you're a member of the team on rotation. While you're on call, you get an email from the help desk asking if there's a problem on the production data warehouse server, and they attach this screenshot:
It takes as little as one word. One word from a co-worker, blog commenter, or Stack Overflow user can make you feel like a champ. (Or a chump, depending on the word.)
(Let's focus on feeling like a champ.)
Backups aren't just for databases. Back in 2012, I started on a journey of sharing my technical knowledge by giving technical presentations. Now this might scare the living jeepers out of most people, but I found it exciting and fulfilling. Since then, I try to speak at ten events a year. Recently, I had the…
You're a data professional working with (or at least applying to work with) a company using the StackOverflow database (I'm using the March 2016 version today). Your users are complaining that this stored procedure is slow:
They didn't give you parameter 26837 - I'm just giving you that so you can see an execution plan.
