Mike Walsh asked a few folks for 4 things they wish they’d have known earlier.
1. You have customers, not users or coworkers. Every person you work with today is a potential reference and a customer for you down the road. Treat them with professionalism and respect.
2. Focus on your customers’ pains. Ask them what sucks, and how you can relieve that pain. Your database server won’t give you a raise for decreasing fragmentation.
3. Keep it short and sweet. Typing a lot doesn’t show off your knowledge – it shows that you don’t respect others’ time. Give them the right information to solve their problems in as little time as possible.
4. Don’t help people for free via private emails. I used to spend hours answering questions for people who can’t be bothered to read the manual. Thing is, they don’t thank you, and they don’t respect your time. Help people in public, under bright lights, at places like Stack Overflow and DBA.StackExchange.com where your work will show up in the search results for the rest of time – thereby helping countless others who have the same problem. These days, when strangers email wanting free help, I use these email templates.
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[…] Brent also reminds me of a great resource we both contributed to from John Sansom. A free e-book for DBAs starting out. Chalk full of great articles. (And thanks to Brent this section got a lot smaller. He quickly shot back his tips, and he was much more to the point.) […]
Absolutely on #2. You also don’t get a bonus for how much disk space you temporarily save by shrinking your log files every night. 🙂
#4 made me think about how back in the late 90s I would spend a whole day emailing back and forth with the author of a Wrox book. That would never happen now.
[…] Brent Ozar – What I Wish I Knew Sooner as a DBA […]
Great! now I have 9 tips 🙂
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/erin/what-i-wish-i-had-known-sooner-as-dba/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-i-wish-i-had-known-sooner-as-dba
[…] faster. Mike asked a few people to share their thoughts, and there are some good ones from Brent Ozar, Erin Stellato, and my favorite Aunt […]
[…] Brent Ozar showed me up with his brevity. And not only his brevity – but he even shared that as one of his tips! “Keep it short and sweet” amen – I took some advice from him there straight away. His other three points are tremendous and you can read them all in about 3.5 minutes. […]