Blog Posts

Epic Life Quest: Level 10 Achieved.

January 9, 2018

Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up. In the last level, I focused a lot on passive income: building training that I could sell, and then getting that educational material out to as many people as possible. That paid off in this level because the passive income gave me more time to focus on other…

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Dream Car Seasonal Garage: 3 Cars, $50K

January 2, 2018

cars

We’re up in Michigan, dogsitting for Dad & Caryl while they’re down in Mexico on vacation. Dad & Caryl’s house started as a 1-bedroom schoolhouse, gradually expanded over the years. I absolutely love their garage setup: 2 main cars, plus a side entry workshop garage, plus space to park another few cars. So I got to thinking – what’d be in my collection if I lived here? And I do mean here, a place where there’s a foot or two of snow on the ground here during the winter. Also, with this area’s history of car manufacturers and suppliers, it’s also…

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Free WordPress Plugins I Recommend for 2018

December 26, 2017

blogging, wordpress

I recently helped Hugo Kornelis set up a new WordPress blog at SQLServerFast.com, and I realized it’s been a while since I listed the plugins I recommend. Here you go: Crayon Syntax Highlighter – show your T-SQL code in all its glory. Has an SSMS 2012 theme, and you can set the default language to T-SQL. Editorial Calendar – I’m a huge believer in scheduling your posts ahead of time. This plugin gives you a drag & drop calendar so you can reorder posts when your priorities change. EU Cookie Law – because the European Union saves your life by telling…

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2018 Data Professional Salary Survey: Early Results Thoughts

December 19, 2017

career, salary

The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open, and you can analyze the results as they’re coming in. As of this writing, we’ve just crossed 1,000 results (last year we ended up with around 3,000). Based on your feedback, I made a few tweaks to the questions and answers. I’m going to focus on a quick check of how those tweaks are doing. We split “DBA” into a few jobs. Last year, 52% of the responders identified as DBAs, so this year we broke that up into 3 titles. Responses so far: DBA (Development Focus – tunes queries, indexes, does…

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My 2018 Learning Goals #tsql2sday

December 12, 2017

career, learning, t-sql tuesday

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Mal asked us to blog about our 2018 learning goals. Her homework assignment included these 3 questions: What do I plan to learn? I like being at the cutting edge, learning things today that people are going to pay a lot for 5-10 years from now. I like to skate to where the puck is going. If a technology is already popular, then it’s too late for me to start learning it. In the early to mid 2000s, that meant learning virtualization, which paid off really well as that grew wildly in popularity. Then around…

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GroupBy’s One Year Anniversary and What’s Next for 2018

December 5, 2017

community, groupby

Last year, I unveiled GroupBy.org, a new free community event where anybody could submit a session on any topic, and the attendees would vote to see what sessions made the cut. I had a lot of questions when we started. Would people submit sessions? What kinds of sessions would readers vote for? Would they prefer attending live, or getting the recordings? When the event first took off and got a lot of abstracts and attendees, I purposely took my hands off the wheel and started letting the audience decide where things went. I stopped doing marketing, stopped pushing for abstracts,…

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Some Large Businesses Like to Work with Other Large Businesses.

November 28, 2017

business, paperwork, setting the tone

Our human resources team Small businesses usually like working with other small businesses. Similarly, large businesses working with other large businesses. During the sales process, small businesses tell me things like, “All the decision-makers are on this call” and “Let’s move forward with this right now. What do we need to do to start tomorrow?” Large businesses are more likely to say, “Please fill out this 26-page PDF to be eligible for a bidding process that will start in three months.” I’ve long believed in this as a kinda-sorta unwritten rule, but I got an email (and a bunch of…

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What Specialists and Generalists Get Paid For

November 21, 2017

career, generalists, specialists

Generalists say things like, “Yeah, I’ve done something kinda like that before, and I’m sure I can figure it out again.” Generalists get paid to learn new things fast and adapt. Specialists say things like, “Yeah, I did that exact same task last week, and I know it forwards and backwards.” Specialists get paid for things they already know very well. Generalists are generally useful. Armed with a good set of generalists, companies can generally tackle most IT problems that come their way. As a company’s tech stack changes, the generalists can learn new skills and stay productive. Therefore, generalists get…

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My #PASSsummit 2017 Session Evaluation Ratings & Comments

November 16, 2017

conference, presenting

After big conferences, I like to share my session evaluations to talk about what worked and what didn’t. Let’s see how we did this year. PASS’s evaluation form this year had 6 questions with a 5-point ranking (I love that): PASS Summit 2017 evaluation form So how’d we do? Pre-Con: Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017 This was an all-day session I co-presented with Erik Darling. 362 attendees, 152 surveys filled out – great completion rate, thanks attendees! Rate the value of the session content. 4.37 out of 5 How useful and relevant is the session content…

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#PASSsummit Session Q&A Experiment with Pinal Dave

November 14, 2017

presenting

When I’m speaking at a conference and the room assignments are published ahead of time, I look at the convention center’s room layouts to figure out how many seats it holds. I want a rough idea of how easy (or hard) the Q&A will be to manage. At this year’s Summit, Erik & I had room 6B for our pre-con, and I had the exact same room for my general session on Friday. From the capacity list pages, you can’t tell how the rooms will be set up (there’s so many ways to set up a room with chairs/tables/rows), but…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.