Tag: thoughts

PASS, Professional Development, Rant

The Argument Against Attending The PASS Summit

Back in 2016 I wrote a post called The Missing Piece of SQL Conferences which provided a perspective of a few DBAs, at various points in their careers, and what the Summit could provide in helping them to move forward. Upshot is that I believed that there was a serious gap for senior level DBAs (this could be true of other folks working in the SQL space, but I focused on what I know best). The post came to mind this week when I was talking with my boss.

“Are you planning on attending Summit this year?” he asked. Instinctively I went to respond in the affirmative, but stopped myself and thought about it for a few seconds. I contemplated the things that I had learned over the last few years of attendance, the things that I could potentially learn this year. This provided me with a few questions that I needed to address as someone with > 15 years as a DBA working with SQL Server.

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PASS

The Missing Piece of SQL Conferences

Recently Steve Jones (b|t) has been writing a series of posts around the Pass Summit and SQL Saturdays. The one posted on July 5th on Choosing Content for the Summit got me thinking about content, not just at the Summit, but also at other various SQL conferences and events.

I had a conversation around the subject of content at Summit (picking on the PASS Summit here as it’s the most visible, however this pertains to SQL Saturday’s, and many other events) with Joey D’Antoni (b|t) and we identified, what we believe to be, missed opportunities.

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Career, Random

Life as a DevOps DBA

A few weeks ago Grant Fritchey (b|t) posted about DevOps, the DBA , and the word “No”. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait right here.

Welcome back. As you’ve just read, Grant ranted a little on the concept that the DBA does nothing but say no to requests, and that people still live the belief that it’s their default response to anything.

The whole concept of the DBA saying no really comes about because the people that are responsible for getting up in the middle of the night, because somebody did something crazy that broke the site, are not fans of a lack of sleep. Hey, if you knew that there was a not-null probability of losing an evening, or a weekend, wouldn’t you be hesitant to allow changes as well.

I spent many years as that gatekeeper. The one that didn’t want to lose that time. I didn’t want to spend my time saying no, but I knew for darn sure that I wanted to understand what was going in and what the potential impact was going to be. After all, I’d rather spend my time figuring out how to simplify managing my enterprise than trying to figure out what was broken with the latest release.

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