Confession Time: I Never Taught You About B-Trees.
I work with databases for a living.
I teach people, and I help them via consulting.
Technical Communication, Presenting, and Writing
Presentations, teaching, blogging, writing, and public professional practice.
67 associated posts45 primary posts
T-SQL & Development
I Hate The Way You’re Using “It Depends.”
Can I be honest with you for a second?
It makes my skin crawl when I hear database people smugly answer a question with "It depends!"
So You Wanna Build an App
I get a lot of emails like this:
Hi! I built an app. Can you take a look at it, give me your feedback, and then help get the word out to your readers?
I Don’t Take Private Questions at Pre-Conference Classes.
When I first started teaching database sessions at conferences, I noticed a pattern.
When I finished the session, closed PowerPoint, and thanked everyone for attending, a big queue of attendees would instantly start forming at the podium. People would line up to ask private questions, one at a time.
Career & Community
Building My Dev/Prod Demon Hunters Session, Part 1: The Strategy
For SQLBits this year, I wanted to submit a performance tuning session about one of the most classic, timeless problems I run into: why is the same query fast in development but slow in production?
All of my regular readers - if there is such a thing - are now yelling out, "Parameter sniffing!"
Helping Software Vendors Talk to DBAs
Software vendors have a wide variety of clients: Some clients don't have any IT staff at all, and just outsource everything. The client wants to hand an installation manual to their contractor and say, "Build whatever the software vendor wants." Some clients have a full time sysadmin or two, and those sysadmins don't really know…
T-SQL & Development
[Video] Building a Brand By Sharing Your Work
You've got a good job, and some spare time. You're thinking about giving back to the community by blogging, presenting, live streaming, or working on Github projects - and you'd like to make your next job search easier. Let's talk about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ3TuMM4cEQ
How to Explain What We Do
One of my favorite uses for AI is to ask it to explain a concept using wildly unusual points of view.
Well, we're going to be seeing various family members and friends for the holidays, and we'll get endless questions of, "So, what is it that you do?" I figured ChatGPT would be the perfect source for answers.
[Video] Consulting Lines
In my consulting work, I often find myself saying the same things to clients - but they're not the kinds of things I said when I was a database administrator. I call these "Consulting Lines", and I talked through 'em:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCA0Oz-uk-s
Use “We” Not “You”. #tsql2sday
For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Louis Davidson suggested we give our past self some advice.
I'd tell myself, "Use 'we', not 'you'."
T-SQL & Development
#TSQL2sday Roundup: The Most Recent Issues You Closed.
For this month's TSQLTuesday, I asked y'all to describe the most recent issues you closed.
If you ask someone in IT, "What do you do for a living?" they struggle with job titles. They say things like:
[Video] How to Use ChatGPT to Write WordPress Blog Posts
Today's live stream was a little different: I demonstrated using the Aiomatic WordPress plugin, ChatGPT, and Azure Open AI to write blog posts. I showed the kinds of content it writes, the kinds of blog post content it doesn't include, and taught you how to identify meaningless word salad blog posts written by people who don't actually know what they're doing.
T-SQL & Development
The Best Career Advice I Ever Got (#TSQL2sday)
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.
[Video] Office Hours: Professional Development Questions
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
[Video] Office Hours: Professional Development Edition
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:
T-SQL & Development
Free Video: 500-Level Guide to Career Internals: Building a Brand
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.
T-SQL & Development
Which Microsoft Certification Should You Get?
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…
What It Takes To Write Two Blog Posts
This week, I published two blog posts:
How Bad Statistics Cause Bad SQL Server Query Performance
How Scalar User-Defined Functions Slow Down Queries
Career & Community
Things To Consider When Submitting Sessions to Paid Online Conferences
Lots of paid conferences are happening online these days, so some of you will be presenting an online session or pre-con for the first time. I've done a bunch of these and been burned in a bunch of ways, so lemme save you some time and heartache. Does the conference own the recordings? And if…
How to Make Online Presentations Fun and Interactive with OBS Scenes
In my recent post about how I use OBS for training classes & webcasts, I mentioned that to keep things lively, you wanna have a variety of scenes that you can switch between to keep the viewer engaged. Imagine a TV show or sporting event that only used one camera angle and screen layout for 30-60 minutes on end: you'd be bored out of your gourd, and you'd tune out.
