dba Archives - Grant Fritchey

04Nov 2019 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

You Are A Coder

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…

21Aug 2019 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

DevOps for the DBA, Slide Deck

DevOps

I have an all day seminar I give called "DevOps for the DBA". If you're attending, thinking of attending, or you have attended, you might want to have the slide deck to review. I have published it here at SlideShare.Net. Fair warning. The slides are not the presentation. When you're attending a class that I teach, you're there for the live, in-person, interactive event of the training. The slides are not meant to be documentation. They are simply guideposts to keep me on track and to help illustrate certain points. If they are helpful to you, I'm happy to share. I just want you to know that reading through the slides can in no way be a substitute for actually showing up. If you would like to attend this seminar,…

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,…

22Nov 2017 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

I May Never Be a Data Scientist

Data Science

Chances are extremely high that I'll never put down Data Scientist as my job. Considering what you do and what you know, I'll bet a healthy percentage of you are in a similar situation. That's OK. You know why? You know a lot about data, data movement and data processing that a Data Scientist doesn't. They Also Serve I don't know about you, but I'm not standing around waiting to serve. Instead, I'd be actively chasing after any and all Data Scientists within my organization offering to serve. If you can't be the Data Scientist who do you want to be? The Data Scientist's go-to technician. That's me handing over a new data set to the Data Scientist I'm working with: OK, really it's the best James Bond and the…

24Feb 2015 by Grant Fritchey 17 Comments

DevOps, the DBA, and the word “No”

DevOps

Check out this DevOps Reactions animated GIF and caption. It's funny on multiple levels, but it also makes me both mad and disappointed. I get mad because it's 2015. Surely by now most of us, especially those who have worked in the enterprise with development teams, know that the old 1970s vision of a walled off data center with DBAs in white lab coats acting as gatekeepers to the data is long discredited. As DBAs, even if you're not working with development teams at all, you're just offering a service to the business. This whole, a DBAs favorite word is "NO", meme needs to die a quick, hard, death. All those "Technology X" is going to eliminate the DBA articles that come out every six months like a comet with…

08Jul 2014 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Worst Day of a DBAs Life

Professional Development, Redgate Software

Red Gate Software is running a campaign around coping with the worst day of a DBAs life. We've been posting some really fun stories with, I hope, a kernel of useful information inside each. Chances are, if your DBA career has been like mine, your worst days don't involve explosions and car chases. But now they're asking for people to write up stories, what was the worst day in your life as a DBA. I know, I know, first world problems, right? Regardless, I have yet to put a company out of business or kill anyone with any errors I've made, although I've worked at places where either was possible. But the one day that just stands out, well it started about three weeks ahead of the bad day. I…

30Jun 2014 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

The Curse of Working With A DBA

DevOps, Professional Development

I no more than finished my rant from last week than I started thinking about all the reasons why a healthy chunk of the reasons that developers want to bypass relational database is not the horror of the relational database itself, although, that's there. No, a very large reason why is the DBA. We're on a blog called The Scary DBA. I earned that title, well sometimes. Sometimes I got it and I wasn't sure why. However, it's perfectly in keeping with how many people view their database administrators; grumpy, obstructionist, slow, difficult, control freak, etc.. There are even jokes about it, "What's the DBAs favorite word? No!" And for those answering "It depends" that's two words. I understand why. In large part it's that phone in your pocket (used…

18Jun 2014 by Grant Fritchey 12 Comments

The Curse of Relational Databases

Professional Development

Let's face it, none of Information Technology is easy. Oh yeah, there are those few geniuses that have an absolute grasp over some small aspect of the stack, or those other geniuses that have a very shallow knowledge level, but understand the entire stack. But the stack itself, it's vast, deep, wide, utterly unfathomable. So what do you do? You cheat. You take shortcuts. You ignore things you don't like/understand/appreciate. And then there's all the things you just don't know. Or, you cheat another way, you get experts that have drilled down on a particular technology so that they'll provide you with the knowledge you need. Ah, but then you have to listen to them and what happens when your local genius (deep or wide) doesn't agree with your hired…

22Apr 2014 by Grant Fritchey 22 Comments

I Am Better Than You

DevOps

That is a patently false statement and total BS. It sure does crawl up your spine though doesn't it? Why then do we need to do this? I read an article, "How DevOps is Killing the Developer," and, frankly, was a little put off by this: Good developers are smart people. I know I'm going to get a ton of hate mail, but there is a hierarchy of usefulness of technology roles in an organization. Developer is at the top, followed by sysadmin and DBA. QA teams, "operations" people, release coordinators and the like are at the bottom of the totem pole. Why is it arranged like this? Because each role can do the job of all roles below it if necessary. Nice to know I'm almost as good as…

15Apr 2014 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

SQL Server First Aid

DevOps, Professional Development

If you take basic first aid, say a CPR course, you'll learn a handy mnemonic for the primary assessment you have to make, A-B-C. That breaks down as Airway, Breathing, Circulation. Is there an open airway so they can breathe? Are they breathing? Do they have circulation, a pulse, are they alive in short. I recently took a two day course on wilderness first aid (on top of CPR training and first responder training and basic and advanced first aid training and Scout training and Scout first-aid training and I'm sure I'm forgetting some) that added to that, D-E. We now have Disability and Environment. In short, just how responsive is the person or do they have the possibility of spinal issues? What's the environmental situation, lieing on cold ground,…

Tag: dba