Sammy SQL

My thoughts on starting a blog, so long ago it seems now, didn’t take into consideration the fact that I hate writing. Recently, I took a Strengths Finder assessment and found that one of my strengths was was I had considered a weakness for so long. I love to learn new things and do new things that I enjoy. But I tend to avoid things at the same time that I don’t enjoy. Procrastination… Maybe. To me I believe its my mind’s way of telling me I need to focus my efforts on things that make me happy.

Given my new outlook.. In no way, shape or form do I intend to have this blog professional looking. This will be my place to mark the changes in my career and family and the occasional SQL server findings. Hopefully, more of the later. There will be most likely formatting and otherwise grammatical issues as I’ll be typing in half sleep in most cases, like I am now. I always say “My tired talking is like my drunk talking but with less spelling errors..”. Talking/texting/typing.. its all the same random thoughts when it gets to this point.

Speaking of HAPPY..

After my previous post on my intent to dive into becoming a DBA and moving away from a programming career, it took awhile. This past August, I was given the amazing opportunity to dive in a position and career as a DBA at a financial services/insurance company. Previously I was in a do-it-all, jack-of-all-trades role (except I wasn’t very far into the jack part) as a accidental DBA and application developer. I now work as a DBA with a team of DBAs, all working together. I love my new position and the opportunities for growth it provides. I have teammates to turn to when I have questions. And someone to turn to for feedback on any change and any other possibly better options.

I still absorb all of the information I can get my hands on to fill this role to the best of my ability. I feel I have grown quite a bit in the past 6 months. SSIS, SSRS, Release management with environments, powershell, and what I needed the most help in –  “administration”. However, there is still a lot more yet to learn. Given that, the one thing that drives me the most is that I am always learning something new each day that applies to what I need to know.  I’m in a position where I won’t be stuck in a rut on learning for a very long time, if ever.

I’m very active now for SQL Saturdays in the mid-west and try to make all of them within a 5-6 hour drive. I haven’t found a decent option for child care to make it to most monthly meetings but hope to change that before summer.

I was given the opportunity to attend IE01 for SQLSkills for Accidental DBA. This helped me tremendously fill the holes in my administration side and find the questions I needed to ask to be comfortable in my new environment.

Presenting –

This past June for SQL Saturday Iowa City, I dived into presenting for the first time. A short lunch session on a fun topic, “Just because SQL server lets you do it, doesn’t mean you should… “. I enjoyed this, but feel it was lacking in a few items that I now want to add for the next time I present on that rounded fun topic.

In the meantime, I’m taking my worst experience with SQL Server to-date and turning it into a session. So far titled “Collation.. Collation.. Collation..” but may be changes to “Collation Nightmare!”. This was the name of the folder I kept my scripts in. I had to figure out how to re-collate about half or more of the columns in a list of 1200 text based columns. Of these columns, at least half had any variation of constraints that held up the collation change. You can find out more by attending my session. I’ll be previewing it in February at the I-380 monthly meeting.  I hope to have these scripts rebuilt and expand them to change the collation database wide.

Although it was a nightmare at the time, it was only so because I had no knowledge of what collation even was when I first saw big red the message: “Cannot resolve the collation conflict between <collation1> and <collation2> in the equal to operation“. And there wasn’t much out there at the time for anything other than the definition of the components of collation and how to change the collation on one column. I had at least 300 columns with over 600 constraints to drop and readd.. at least 20 times over. Of course I needed to find a more automated process. So we created one. I created the scripts to build the drop and create statements. Ran the drop on everything, changed all collation and then ran the adds. This process would of course not work for a heavy system to stay online. So I’ll be working through some tweaks. In my newly found knowledge of powershell and SSIS, I know I can come up with a much better option to minimize performance issues overall during this process.  I feel I have learned quite a bit along the way and want to help others learn how to prevent issues with it themselves.

The non-SQL side of things-

My son (Zachary) is now 3 1/2 years old, going through potty training. He’s sassy, smart and STUBBORN. I wonder where he gets that from?…

I sold my horse around the same time I moved for this new position and renting out my previous house until I can get it ready for sale. Living in an apartment now is surely a big change, but we’ve adjusted well and have very good (understanding) neighbors.

Moving to a larger area was a minor adjustment and I focused our first few months here on finding the necessities and not going too far very often. Since then, I’ve been driving around a few times a week to find more things and am starting to learn how much bigger the Quad Cities are than I originally thought. However, taking it slowly has made the adjustment so much easier. If you hadn’t noticed, bigger cities are not my thing. This country girl has to have fields and open within 10 min drive or my anxiety kicks in.

I’ve started using a product called Thrive from Le-Vel. Its pretty amazing stuff to boost energy and adds an additional boost to my health, that I needed. I had to stop taking it during the move due to my budget shrinking to catch up from the moving expenses. I re-ordered it last week and am back to staying up late to get things done and getting up early. 6-8 hours of sleep are what works for me. Thrive helps me if I get less than that. This fall however, I was drained.. even 10 hours of sleep and I had to have coffee like crazy.

I’m on the search for local parents for a fitness swap. 3-4 individuals with kids willing to swap days for workout and childcare. Nothing kills workout motivation like a 3.5 year old pile-driving you in the gut mid sit-up… The goal is to get 4 workouts in a week and one day watching all kids. Having more than 1 other individual not only increases the options for available workout days, but also allows for pair/group workouts. I have more motivation to push harder and do a workout when someone else is relying on me to be there and push them in return.

Thanks for reading and see you in another year here on sammysql.com… Just kidding.. I’m setting a goal for myself for once a month.. even if just a short snippet.

Have a great one!!