Entering the profession, changing roles, and evaluating career direction.
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I'm up in North Bay, Ontario, Canada for the 2026 Can-Am Curling Cup run by Aaron Bertrand - and my team actually won!
Let's bask in the warmth (cough) of our glory as we go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
The results are in! You can download the raw data in Excel for all 10 years and do some slicing and dicing to find out whether you're underpaid, overpaid, or what it looks like for folks who are out there looking for work. This year, I added a couple of new items to the survey…
There was an interesting post on Reddit yesterday asking what DBA jobs are like these days. Here's a snippet of the most important part: Our friend works for maybe 15 hours a week, on call for maybe 40 but is always running around not in front of his computer. She works odd hours, takes the…
One of my readers asked me to give a 30-minute talk to their company's internal employees discussing the job market at large. The target audience was technical people of all disciplines - not just database administrators, but all kinds of people who worked with technology.
My goal with the talk was to help people think about lots of possible next-steps in their career journey. I wanted to show how the skills they've already developed might be useful in jobs they hadn't thought about before.
Eitan Blumin recently wrote a post about the future of the DBA career in which he talked about the rise of jack-of-all-trades IT professionals. It's a good post. You should read it. I did, and over the last 20 years, I'm pretty sure I've read a dozen variations of that post.
There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
I have been absurdly lucky to be around so many amazing and inspirational managers. Almost everything I know was taught to me by someone else. Over my life, I've learned so much about careers, marketing, business, communications, teaching, databases, you name it.
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Gethyn Ellis asked us to share the best career advice we've ever received. That was a seriously tough call: I've gotten so many gems over the years.
This month on the blog is Community Tools Month, and I'm going to be talking about some of the most useful and influential tools out there.
You can't learn them all - *I* can't learn them all - because there just aren't enough hours in the day to do your work, keep your skills sharp, take care of yourself, and take care of the ones you love.
You're overwhelmed with choices: so many things you could learn, so many ways you could specialize in your career. Which one should you choose? What are the safe bets, and what are the risky bets? Should you be a contractor? A consultant? A freelancer? Specialize in the cloud, and if so, what products? There's no guide for data professionals here, and it's kinda scary.
Most of the questions y'all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are technical ones, but there were a handful of interesting professional development and career ones in the queue, so I cherry-picked those for today's episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAd9a3k9K1A
I spent an entire video just talking about 3 questions y'all posted to https://pollgab.com/room/brento because these were pretty big-picture and important.
I know it sounds goofy and sentimental, but I genuinely care about y'all's careers, and I want you to work as little as practical in order to spend as much time with your loved ones as possible. So here we go:
Succeeding as a data professional is all about placing the right bets at the right times. The more you know about what’s happening around you, the better bets you can place. I’ve been working with databases for over two decades. In this session, I’ll invite you into my home to have a frank, honest discussion…
Last week, I shared my 300-Level Guide to Career Internals post & video. We talked about how the world is changing so quickly, and how it's a great time to adapt your career to accomplish the things in life that are important to you. One of the possible outcomes that we discussed was working for yourself.
Hi. I'm writing this from a cottage in Iceland, in the midst of a 9-month digital nomad stint.
I'm teaching classes and doing client work for 1-2 weeks, then Erika and I take off and hit the road for 2-3 weeks at a time, driving around the country, seeing the sights, and sharing 'em on my Instagram feed.
You work with data, and you're thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job... Then get the certification you see mentioned the most often in the descriptions of the job you're looking for. This is just a little tricky because certifications shown on…
Here's the last video in my vacation series with the answers to your most-upvoted professional development questions. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unUfDYNCtNo
Last week, I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y'all asked a lot of good ones. Here's the next video with the questions you upvoted the most, and I'll post the last round of 'em next week.
https://youtu.be/9jfl3wTk0i4
I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y'all asked a lot of good ones. Here were the questions you upvoted the most, and I'll post another round of 'em next week.
The audio on this isn't up to my usual home-studio quality, of course!
You've been using Microsoft SQL Server for a few years, and it's becoming increasingly important to your job.
You can write a query, but...
You've stumbled upon this blog, and you're having a pretty good time. Now you're wondering, "Where else can I network with database folks, get to know them, and talk shop?" You're not getting out due to the quarantines, so your local user group isn't fulfilling your networking cravings. You wanna know what else is going on. I've got a ton of good news.
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:
