Blogs

6 Ways to Advance Your IT Career

The “Great Resignation” is upon us, or so the internet tells us. People want better working conditions, better wages, just… better. Large swaths of people are trying to advance their careers. Here are 6 ways to advance your IT career.

1. Accept that long term loyalty to a small to mid-sized company is likely keeping your salary low and limiting opportunities.
2. Use the wizards at salary.com to plug in the job titles you want and discover what you should be making.
3. Focus on building technical skills, especially early in your career
4. Work on your interviewing skills
5. Start blogging
6. Start presenting

How to Advance Your IT Career: Here is How I did It

1. I realized that long term loyalty to my small to mid-sized company was keeping my salary low.

Career growth opportunities were limited. The company I was in when I launched my IT career probably had 200-300 people in their corporate office and there were 8-12 local offices that had maybe 5-10 people working out of each of them. So, less than 500 employees. We weren’t big.

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Error Messages 8114 or 22122 When Performing Change Tracking Cleanup

You’re a data professional and you’re trying to keep up with patching a wide range of SQL Server versions and editions. How do you know what’s in the CU and whether you should apply it or not? My favorite way to read up on CUs is to go to SQLServerUpdates and click around there.  It will take you to the latest CU pages as well as give you a way to see previous CUs that are available.

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Thoughts On Pass Data Community Summit 2021

Pass Data Community Summit was November 10-12 and was hosted and sponsored by RedGate along with other supporting sponsors like Microsoft and smaller companies like MinionWare. Having been to last year’s virtual Summit, I think this one was done much better.

Pre-conference Sessions

There were a big collection of pre-conference sessions. I attended “AWS for SQL Server Professionals” because my current employer is entirely in AWS. Erin Stellato had an all day session on Query Store that I attended as well. For a shorter, one hour version of this presentation, click here to go to a YouTube presentation by Erin at the Saint Charles SQL Server Meetup. I learned a lot in both all day sessions and I plan on attending pre-conference sessions next time as well.

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6 Steps to Build a Training Plan

As an athlete there is a certain amount of preparation that goes into being selected to be on a team, competing for a starting role and then being competitive with the opponent. For tennis players to be competitive and go to the finals in Wimbledon, it takes hours and hours of training, practice, and discipline to eat well before ever stepping on the court in a tournament. To make a basketball team, takes hours of practice by yourself on a basketball court and competing with others and your team mates. To make the starting line up takes hard work, outside of game day. A certain hunger and desire to grow and be more than you currently are is important as an athlete.

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6 things to consider when presenting

Things to consider when presenting

I’ve presented a few times recently and discovered I like doing it. Presenting is a great way to give back to the I.T. community - in this case the SQL Server community. I’ve previously blogged about things I learned from giving my first presentation, and what it was like presenting at New Stars of Data. Here are six additional thoughts on presenting.

• Be sure you show up early for your presentation

The day of New Stars of Data, I was up 90 minutes earlier than usual to use the link to the track I was in to join a panel discussion in progress. I just wanted to be sure that the link was going to work and catch a bit of that presentation. I also wanted to be sure I was wide awake when it was time for me to  present. Slumber does not mix well with presenting!

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What is it like to be a presenter at the News Stars of Data virtual conference

Back in early July 2021, I presented at the SQL Server Meetup I co-host with Anthony Fortner. We had a speaker no show a couple of months prior and then for the July meeting a speaker had to cancel about a week before the meeting. I couldn’t let another month go by with no Meetup. So, I created a presentation from nothing, practiced it and gave it live for the first time in about a 7 day time span. It took about 15 hours of work and was my first SQL Server presentation to a public group. I learned a number of things from that experience. Then I gave a revamped version of the presentation to New Stars of Data in late October.

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Four Areas to Focus on When You Start A New DBA Role

You’ve just been hired into a DBA role at a new company, or you’ve been given the DBA keys at your current company. Maybe you’re a SysAdmin and your boss has informed you that you are now supposed to manage the SQL Servers as well as everything else on your plate. In any of these situations, you may have some confidence in your skills, but especially in the case of being a new hire, you have absolutely no true idea of what you’re walking into.

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Three Keys to SQL Server Performance

Everyone wants good performance from their database systems. Some even expect and need a high performing Ferrari all the time. How is this achieved though? What do you need to understand about SQL Server specifically in order to make your company’s applications hum along like a well tuned car? We will look at three keys to SQL Server performance.

SQL Server Performance

SQL Server Memory

1. SQL Server must be able to cache sufficient data in memory

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How I Became a Database Administrator

I recently saw a Tweet from Kendra Little where she asked the simple question, “What got you into databases?”  I’m intrigued by people’s stories of how they got into their current careers so I looked through the thread. There were lots of interesting paths shared and even a blog post was shared by someone who had recently written about how they got into a career involving databases. Kendra’s question and all of the interesting responses inspired me to write a post about my story.

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How to Use the SQL Server CONCAT Function

SQL Server concatenation methods have been enhanced in modern versions of SQL Server. SQL Server 2012 introduced the CONCAT() function. In SQL Server 2017 we get CONCAT_WS().

A common usage of concatenation, or joining column values together in a string, is combining a FirstName and LastName column into a FullName column.  Another common usage might be for creating an address column that pulls together building number, street, city and zip code.

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