Monthly Archives: February 2018

I am a passionate, regular attendee of Techoutbound (formerly SQLCruise) events. I try to do at least one every year.  This year’s cruise on east coast was to East Caribbean – with an itinerary that was different from original because of hurricane related issues in the area. We were doing Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Grand Stirrup Cay and finally the Bahamas.

Day 0: Miami: Since I am on a telecommute based job now, I was able to spare myself the rigors of last minute travel and head to Miami a good 3 days before the cruise. I booked myself into an airbnb accomodation at North Miami beach – worked out of there for 3 days enjoying the warm Florida sun and was ready in time for cruise on saturday. The only thing I didn’t do right perhaps was to misjudge the options around food in North Miami, which is seriously lower than options in downtown. Even with grubhub, ubereats and stuff like that – finding good food delivery was hard. Note to myself  – if I do this again is to find a more food-friendly part of town.

Day 1: I headed to the Marriott hotel early in the morning – had breakfast with Kevin Kline(t) and his wife Rachel (whom I met for the first time), new cruisers David McAtee(l) and Nathan Vanden Hook(t). We then proceeded to port. Boarding was quicker than usual and we were able to get to breakfast by 11 30 AM. After a good meal I went to the rooms and took a long nap through departure. In the evening we met up for the welcome party – where I got to say hello to many former cruisers – organizers Tim Ford(b|t), Amy Ford and their son Trevor, Argenis Fernandez (t) and his family, Grant Fritchey(b|t) and his wife, John Martin(t) , Stephanie Locke(t) and her husband, former cruisers Sander Stad. my good friend Joe Sheffield (t) and his family. After some catch-up I retired early.

Day 2: This was our day at sea. The first class started with Argenis’s class on Linux for the DBA. I learned about history of Linux in general, and how it evolved its way into Microsoft as an alternate OS hosting SQL Server. I enjoyed the class. Following that we had a class on Data Science Fundamentals with Steph Locke. Steph went over basics of data science, what is involved in presenting ideas to management, working with teams, coming up with right algorithms (you need to treat them like ‘cattle’ and have many 🙂 and deployment strategies. As an aspiring data science person, I hugely enjoyed her class. The afternoon was taken with Grant Fritchey explaining Execution Plan basics. Although it was mostly stuff I knew – Grant is a great teacher and enjoyed every bit of the class. The day wound up with formal dinner – I sat at the table with my good friend Argenis and his family – greatly enjoyed chatting and getting to know them better.

Day 3: This was our day at port at Falmouth, Jamaica. My friend Joe Sheffield had arranged for a group of us to go to Dunn’s River Falls. Joe, by the way, is another frequent cruiser and also an unofficial tour organizer for many cruise events. We loaded ourselves into the bus and made our way to the waterfalls. My thought was just that this would be a visit to a waterfall, and I’ve seen many – but it turned out to be quite different. The waterfalls are layered, with limestone rocks. The water is about 4-5 feet deep at layers, and it makes for a wonderful climbing place. We were split into small groups, each with a guide, and started our climb, through the cool,clean but very forceful water – to the peak of the falls, about 950 feet high. It was an adventure to the say the least, and one that had me panic more than once – mostly because I was the shortest person in the team, and also because am prone to hypothermia with standing in water for too long. But things worked out fine – and with able assistance from Kevin Kline and Jason Brimhall/his family – I made my way to the very top. This is one adventure that I absolutely plan to do again, with a more relaxed state of mind since I know what to expect. We made a brief stop at a beach on the way back and went back to the ship, tired to the bone but very pleased and happy.

Day 4: This was another day at port at Cayman Islands. I was very tired from the previous excursion and chose to hang mostly on the ship. In the evening, we had a good class with Kevin Kline on how to present ideas to win executive support. Kevin narrated a story from my own previous job (which I had near-forgotten myself!) where I had to present ideas a certain way to win support for standardising maintenance on servers. I personally always take his wise counsel when it comes to people issues – the class was good demonstration of his knowledge and expertise in this area.

Day 5: This was a full day at sea – beginning with John Martin teaching availability groups on Linux. It was mind boggling to see how much manual work this is to set up, made me personally grateful for ease of doing it on windows. This was followed by Kevin Kline and John Martin talking of future enhancements to SentryOne monitoring product. I use it on a daily basis and really enjoyed the class. Steph Locke did the afternoon session – and taught us how to set up ETL processes with R. I personally find SSIS a big pain, and most shops I’ve worked at can’t afford BIML – so learning this was really useful to me. The last class of the day was with Argenis teaching various storage landscapes again. I unlearned a few assumptions I had around terms like IOPS, using SQL IO and similar tools and also learned several of the new storage devices/methodologies out there , many of which I can’t even pronounce right. It was a great class and a very useful day. During the office hours/networking session – I was able to get very useful tips on salary negotiation, an area am really weak at. Tim Ford and Steph Locke, along with fellow cruiser Nathan Locke helped me understand this way better than I did before. The best part of SQL Cruise is the ability to ask these questions of people who know it better than you do, and get answers that are practical and useful.

Day 6: This was a day at port at Grand Stirrup Cay, a private island owned by the cruise line. It was a clear beach with white sand and azure blue waters, a perfect sunny day like paradise in the Caribbean. I walked the beach for a while and then took an eco boat tour which showed us some of the ecology of  the island and also let us play with some sea animals a bit. I had a very good time and returned to the boat in time in for lunch. In the afternoon, we had a great class with Kevin Kline and John Martin on Proactive Database Administration.

Day 7: The last day was spent at port at Nassau, Bahamas. We spent the morning in class with Grant Fritchey, learning Azure SQL databases. Then I went out for a few hours with Joe Sheffield and his family. We went around victorian part of Nassau, took a few pictures and then headed back to the ship to pack for disembarkment the next day.

It was 7 very productive days of learning, networking and pure fun. Tim made a mention during the cruise, that fun was a very important part of it and that he did not have any issues with anyone highlighting this. I feel the same – you are a better, more productive person if you can relax and have fun, and learn, and why not both in the same week? I highly recommend the next cruise, coming up in Alaska, for anyone who looking to do this. My sincere thanks to Tim and Amy Ford,  SentryOne and RedGate for sponsoring, Mindy Curnett for the swag(handmade soap), speakers and attendees – for making it a great and memorable week.

 

 

 

 

I met Tom Roush for the first time around 9 years ago – at a PASS Summit. If I recall right –  Kendra Little introduced him to me as a colleague from Microsoft and a friend of hers. I met him at several summits following that – found him a kind person with extraordinary cheer and warmth. Our friendship really took off when I started to read his stories. I am an aspiring writer myself, and hope to be one full-time some day. I loved his style of narration and the emotional appeal in them. One of my favorite ones was the one with three christmas trees, which was shared by someone on facebook. I posted a comment there on how much I liked the story. He responded and sent me a friend request. I write little story-like stuff on facebook from time to time – mostly real life happenings that have touched me in some way. He would send me private messages on the story. ‘I liked how you explained that’, ‘this line shows emotional maturity’, ‘on this line you have said this, but perhaps you meant that’…and so on. He did this entirely on his own – somehow sensing that the budding writer in me was so thirsty for feedback.  I learned from some mutual friends of his illness. I never asked him about it as I thought it was personal to him. He shared it on his own one day, and sent me link to the blog where his family wrote on his health and progress. I read it regularly. My mother had passed because of cancer. I knew from reading that his illness was serious and he had limited time.
Sometime during the fall last year – I got an offer to author a book from Apress publishers. It wasn’t exactly a book to write – but more like a series of interviews with data people who were very good at what they did. The choice of people to include in the book was up to me. Tom came to mind immediately. But I did not know if his delicate health would be able to stand the rigors of the hour long interview that the book demanded. So I asked him if he’d be willing to write the answers for me instead. I needed material to fill 10 pages – so there would be considerable typing involved. Tom sent me the answers. It was short of what I needed – so we decided to do another round – after his chemo last week. He said how excited he was to get his name on a ‘technical book’ and promised that he would do it. But that was not meant to happen. Below are Tom’s answers – for your reading. I sorely regret not being able to put them into the book and have it published while he was around. But we got it started, and now, people will read it for sure.  And if you are a DBA, double check if you are doing what he said. Because doing nothing is unacceptable. Even if you are battling cancer. The rest of us have no excuse. NONE EVER. Bill Gates said of Steve Jobs, on the latter’s passing – that knowing him was an ‘insane honor’. I want to say the same – knowing Tom was an ‘insane honor’.  I am honored to publish as below, Tom’s last interview.

1 Describe your journey into the data profession.

[Tom Roush: ] photography – first photojournalism, then freelance, created database to keep track of business – eventually used those skills to transition into IT

2 Describe a few things you wish you knew when you started your career, that you know now and would recommend newcomers to this line of work know?

[Tom Roush: ] I came into it from a photography background – where there’s the right way and every other way to do stuff – understanding in IT that there were SO MANY right ways to do something was really, really hard.

My path was something like this:

Health insurance company

application support

application developer

application administrator for group of 5 people

move to Microsoft

application support/administrator/developer (but for group of about 1000 people globally – comprising 10 databases (there’s more to this) all supporting MSN

report/graphing developer

Move to Getty Images

SQL developer

SQL dba dev/test/staging/load

SQL dba dev/test/staging/load/production

Move to Avanade

            SQL DBA dev/test/staging/prod

   

3 What is a typical day in your life as a professional?

[Tom Roush: ] this has been very interesting because there’s so much change in it. I used to be the sole dba, keeping about 140 servers running.  This was too much, the work/life balance was completely off, and we ended up expanding to a follow the sun model and hired 5 other dba’s to help me, and we ended up with three in India, 1 in Manila, 1 in Buenos Aires, and me in Seattle.  The Buenos Aires one transitioned to a fellow in Toronto.  My role in this is constantly migrating from being a production Tier2 dba to being a production Tier3 lead dba – meaning I will occasionally write code, I get called on for some deep troubleshooting, but a lot of my job involves checking email and trying to keep track of who’s doing what and deconflict various tasks that are being done on the same server.  So – a lot of my day is spent dealing with email from dev teams in  India, my ops team in India, Philippines, and Toronto, and then solving the problems they’re dealing with or unblocking them.  I also spend time passing on knowledge or training them.  A tremendous amount of what I do has to do with training my team, learning about and overcoming cultural issues.  This is tremendously important because the words we use are not necessarily heard the same way by the various people on the team.  Example: for a time I was dealing with the culture of all the folks mentioned above, and they all had varying skill levels, different work ethics, different things that motivated them. (What motivates the team in Bangalore is radically different than what motivates the fellow in Manila.)

 

5 Describe a few things which any data professional should know as best practices?

[Tom Roush: ] do not try to reinvent every wheel you need. 

Every problem you face will likely be a problem someone else has faced before.

Know that there are people who will want to help you if you are brave enough to ask.

Monitor, monitor, monitor – and know what to do when you discover something wrong.

When troubleshooting – start with the simple – but be prepared to go deep.

6 Describe a few things which any data professional should avoid as worst practices?

[Tom Roush: ] doing nothing (unacceptable)

No backups (unacceptable)

The 9 letters that can get you fired RPO/RTO/CYA

being a lone ranger.  Definitely get involved with others – don’t have lunch by yourself if you can avoid it; take the time to get away

 

8 Describe your experience with cloud adoption.

[Tom Roush: ] we have moved many of our systems, in whole or in part, to the cloud, from iaas, paas, and so on.

My personal experience has been that my team does the work

9 What are some of your favorite tools and techniques?

[Tom Roush: ] tools? Frankly, ssms is what works and what I can use.  Having the budget for tools I’d like to purchase has been an issue – so I end up either writing my own tools or finding tools/scripts out there.  Those would be:

Sp_whoisactive

The SP_blitz family of scripts

Ola Hallengren’s scripts

My own scripts – I write code so it’s dynamic – meaning it knows which datacenter it’s in, which environment it’s in – code that’s written this way may, for example, not have backups running in the test environment, but does have them running in production.  In essence, got a GPS on it.  The code is identical on each server, the variables are dynamically generated values for each individual server.

Etc.

11 What are your favorite books/blogs/other means of learning?

[Tom Roush: ] SQL skills, BrentOzar sqlserverperformance, sswug – various things that pop up in the twitter feed.

12 What are your recommended ways of stress management and developing healthy work-life balance?

[Tom Roush: ] flying in a sailplane, writing stories, walking by the beach, prayer, meditation, totally disconnecting from electronics (this is a struggle for me).

13 Describe your style of interviewing a data professional – what do you look for and what are some examples of questions you ask?

[Tom Roush: ] Conversationally – I use Brent’s interview questions with my own additions.  They’re always open ended questions that are very specifically real life types of scenarios.  I’ve been in the business long enough to be able to have a few.  I look for flexibility in thinking, the ability to start with the basic questions and work toward the complex, I also insist that they explain things to me in a non-technical way – like they would explain to an elderly relative.

Numbered questions are below

1. If I give you a new sql server and tell you to set up backups, what do you do?
2. tell me something about sql that mystifies you
3. explain diff between a clustered index and nonclustered index.
4. multiple users report sql is running slow for the first time today – what do you do?
5. explain diff between simple/full/bulk logged recovery models.
6. when you have to work on a server you’ve never touched, what’s the first thing you do?
7. phone rings. server’s down – what are the first three things you do?
8. tell me about your favorite script. what does it do?
9. non urgent sql problem – can’t find answer in web search result.  what do you do?

10 urgent sql problem – down server. what do you do?

11. a vendor app has slow queries, what are some ways you can do to make them faster?
12. latest thing you learned the hard way about sql server.
13. how to you keep from running a query on the wrong server?
14. explain RPO and RTO (six letters that get you fired)
15. name two ways you can tell sql has restarted unexpectedly the night before.
16. situation: blocking, you get alerts, but you don’t know which db. What would you do to track this?

14 What are your contributions to community and why do you recommend people be involved iwth community?

[Tom Roush: ] I spoke at several SQL Saturdays, spoke at the SSWUG virtual conference for three years, blog, and I do my best to stay involved in community.

 

[Tom Roush: ] treat everyone with respect.  Know that not everyone has gotten to where they are using the same method you used, everyone has different experiences – and strengths come from those.