04Nov 2019 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

You Are A Coder

DevOps, Professional Development
So, you say you're a DBA. I say you're not. You say you're a system administrator. I say you're wrong. We are all coders now. Every single one of us. You are a coder. Put down the brick and let me explain. Automation There was a time when I would give a presentation to a room full of people and ask, "Who is using PowerShell right now?" and get, 15 hands out of a hundred. Last week at SQL in the City in London, the same question came up and most of the room raised their hands. What's changed? Automation. Automate all the things!!! The simple fact of the matter is, anything easy, repetitive, and quantifiable is, has been, or shortly will be, automated. You should not be spending your…
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14Jan 2019 by Grant Fritchey 14 Comments

DevOps and Automation Will Eliminate the DBA

DevOps
I've been reading about the death of the DBA ever since I first made the jump from full time developer to full time data professional. The first time I heard it was when SQL Server 7.0 was released. Did you know that SQL Server 7.0 was self-tuning? In fact, it was so self-tuning that the DBA is a relic of the past and no one will be paid for that kind of work any more. Right. So, twenty years later, several versions of SQL Server with tons of improvement from back in the day, and I'm still working (and I hope you are too). Object databases were going to eliminate the DBA. ORM tools were going to eliminate the DBA. Then of course, NoSQL absolutely eliminated the DBA. In fact,…
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02Nov 2010 by Grant Fritchey 12 Comments

TSQL Tuesday: Why Are DBA Skills Necessary

Misc
  Quote: "Database stuff, all this programming stuff, is easy. Anyone can do it. That's why everyone in the company has sa privileges." For nine months, I worked in an environment where everyone, from developers to QA to the sales people to the receptionist, had SA privileges. You know what? DBA skills are necessary. I speak from the point of view of someone that has had to recover a server after a salse person helpfully "cleaned up the temporary stuff on the server" by dropping tempdb, causing a late deployment for a client. I speak from the point of view of the guy who kept a window open on his desk with the database restore script ready to run, all day long, because of "accidents" that stopped development until I could get the…
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25Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Microsoft Links to Help Your Career

Misc
I received this list of links from my Microsoft rep. It was really an impressive list. So I asked if I could post it to the blog. Figures, it was already out there. Buck Woody had compiled it. It's worth a look through. There really is a lot of information that focuses on you and your career available from Microsoft. Who knew that a big company like that could be so helpful. Also, how great was it that Buck Woody pulled it all together for convenience.
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01Aug 2008 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

A Horseless Carriage?

Misc
I've talked before about my concern that I'm manufacturing buggy whips.  Jason Massie over at StatisticsIO has posted a pretty convincing argument that cloud computing could be a horseless carriage coming down the road. Effectively we're still looking Diesel's first engine, but that could mean it's just a matter of time. As Mr. Massie points out, the speed of change in IT is one heck of a lot faster than in other parts of the world. So, when you do finally see that Stanley Steamer roar by, belching smoke and going half the speed of a good horse, don't laugh and point. Someone is spending time & money on that thing and they're not buying your buggy whip. Clouds are just like any other major technological shift (ORM anyone?) that could…
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