Blog Posts

What Would a SQL Server Experience Index Look Like?

January 14, 2014

The Windows Experience Index was a neat way to get a quick idea of how fast your hardware was relative to the rest of the world. It gauged the performance of your processor, memory, graphics card, and storage. You could see the weakest link in your rig, and then focus your upgrade money there. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the non-geek consumer’s first chance to instantly compare desktops next to each other at stores and get a feel for whether they were hot or not. Let’s build this for SQL Server. We need to decide two things: what we’re…

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Is Your Boss Warming Up the Bus?

January 7, 2014

career

Every now and then in my consulting work, I see pending doom. Here’s how it looks: The geek doesn’t talk to the business users. The geek gets all of their marching orders directly from the manager, and the manager is the one talking to the business. The geek reports their project status to the manager, but never gets invited to company-wide status meetings. The manager is losing business requirements in translation. Maybe the business users are getting angrier and angrier about bad database performance, but the manager isn’t clearly communicating that to the geek. The geek is marching on about their…

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Epic Life Quest: Leveled Up.

December 24, 2013

life quest, personal

We hit a really cool business goal this week, so I went to update my Epic Life Quest page and realized I’d left out a whole lot of goals. Turns out I’d leveled up when I wasn’t really paying attention! Here’s what I did in level 3: Sas Christian’s Eclipse Study Publish 4 new training courses – I’ve done a lot of in-person and online presentations, but for 2013, our company’s setting up a new way of doing it. Completed 2013. Acquire Sas Christian original sketches – I’ve adored Sas’s art for years, and while I still can’t afford the original…

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Working with the Best Developers

December 17, 2013

business, productivity

Developers, stop reading this now. This post isn’t for you. This post is for the sysadmins and database admins, the people who have to keep the digital pipes unclogged. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had a brilliant interview at the Lean Startup Conference. It’s chock full of good stuff and you should totally watch the whole thing, but this one-minute exchange is one of my favorites: Interviewer: “So you mentioned accountability and I was curious about that… Almost all the metrics [you monitor] were about how customers use the site, but not how employees are working, and I wondered if there…

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Advice for Aspiring DBAs: Reach Out and Teach

December 10, 2013

career, community, presenting

As you transition into database administration full time, you’re going to be working with more people in different departments. The developers, systems administrators, SAN admins, BI team, project managers, and end users will all interact with you because you hold the keys to the data. Jeremiah presenting at SQL Intersection in Vegas It’s tempting to think of yourself as an all-knowing magical guardian, and to think of others as morons. As you gain knowledge, you might become condescending to others. You’ll get angry with developers who don’t write flawless queries, or project managers who think they can host a multi-terabyte…

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My Favorite Consulting Startup Resources

December 3, 2013

business, consulting, productivity

A friend of mine was asking for advice about starting up a consulting company, and I realized I’ve got a lot of good links piled away. Here’s some of my favorites: Me and my wonderful cofounders Designing the Business So You Want to Be a Consultant – explains the different kinds of consultants, how they manage money, how to build customer relationships, and more. Your Crappy Little Services Business – there’s nothing wrong with building a consulting company instead of an aggressively growth-focused dot-com startup. The Hacking Business Model – we wanted to run a really different consulting company, and we wrote up…

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Posts I Couldn’t Develop in 2013

December 3, 2013

blogging

All year long, I pile up blog post ideas in my task list and work through them. As the year winds to a close, I go through my list and set some of the ideas free. I like the ideas – but there’s just not enough hours in the day to do justice to ’em. It’s kinda therapeutic to set the ideas free. Steve Jobs Almost Saved Windows Phone – When the iPhone first came out, Jobs didn’t want native apps running on the phone. He wanted all apps to be web sites so that you could build them once…

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How to Pass the Microsoft MVP Exam

November 18, 2013

community, microsoft, mvp, nda

The process of becoming a Microsoft MVP is shrouded in mysteries and non-disclosure agreements. Even after you become an MVP, it’s not clear how Microsoft picks who gets the MVP award. Let’s start with the obvious: the Microsoft MVP nomination form. Anyone can nominate themselves (or others) on that site. The first key is the opening paragraph on the page: “To become an MVP, it takes truly exceptional, voluntary contributions to Microsoft-related social and technical communities, coupled with outstanding community leadership and a willingness to freely share deep technical knowledge with others.” Let’s break that paragraph down and analyze it.…

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Why I Broke the #SQLpass Rules (And How It Worked)

November 7, 2013

pass, presenting, sp_AskBrent, sqlpass

I like trying new ways of delivering presentations, pushing the boundaries of what’s normal at conferences. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying a few different things: Giving out a stored proc and walking the audience through using it Making webcast attendees run queries on their systems while they watch the session Handing out pieces of paper making attendees fulfill queries This year at the PASS Summit in Charlotte, I wanted to try another new experiment – simulate what a DBA’s life is really like onstage. I brought them in to learn about performance troubleshooting basics, just like…

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What I Have Learned About Job Searching

October 29, 2013

career, jobs, recruiters

The worse the job, the more money the company has to pay to get the right candidate. The more fun and relaxing the job, the less the company has to pay to get the right candidate. But this doesn’t mean when you see a low-paying job from a recruiter that it’s actually a good job. Remember, that’s their asking price, not what they paid to get the right candidate. Why Jobs From Recruiters Usually Suck When a really good company has a really good job opening, all of their employees tell all of their friends. The position is filled instantly…

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Hi. I’m Brent.