Category Archives: Training
We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Blog
We interrupt our regularly schedule blog, the SQL Saturday Schoolhouse, to bring you a blog live from SQL Saturday #110 from KForce in beautiful, historic Ybor City (aka Tampa). With around 350 registered attendees and several big name speakers flying in to our beautiful state, the excitement level was through the roof.
I have attended several great sessions today, learned a few new things, goofed off on twitter hoping to catch speakers with their twitter feed on, took my picture with a Lamborghini Countach, met a bunch of twitter friends in real life, remotely fixed a production systems administration problem, got some new laptop stickers, got some new pens, talked to some vendors about things that pain me in my daily world, ate some great Cuban food, saw SQLChicken rap like Vanilla Ice, created the blog world’s longest and most annoying string of disjointed phrases, and once again had a wonderful #SQLFamily day! I hope you too are taking advantage of this wonderful, FREE resource.
Enjoy!
SQL Saturday #110 Countdown
SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa is only a few days away…have you registered yet? Check out the schedule of speakers, especially if you have already setup your Guidebook app as there has been some minor shuffling over the last few days. There will be 35 great sessions and lunch is provided thanks to our great sponsors.
If you are interested in volunteering, please sign up now as your help is always appreciated. I look forward to seeing you there on Friday, if you are volunteering, and Saturday for some great #SQLAwesomeness!!
Enjoy!
SQL Saturday #110 – Tampa
We interrupt this episode on Sunday Funday to remind everyone that next Saturday, March 10th, is SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa. Over the last year, I have become a passionate proponent of attending SQL Saturdays working diligently to attend ones that are close to me. How can you pass up free training?
If you have not signed up to attend this SQL Saturday, then what are waiting for? Check out the schedule of sessions, as we have some pretty top-notch speakers. My biggest problem is that there are too many good sessions and inevitably, I miss a great one. That is a good problem to have! If you want to help out with this SQL Saturday, be sure to fill out the volunteer section of your registration. If you see me at SQL Saturday, feel free to say howdy!
Enjoy!
Saturday SQL Schoolhouse
SQL Schoolhouse!
In our first installment of the Saturday SQL Schoolhouse for March, I wanted to share a website that has numerous videos, blog posts and other resources that can teach you some nifty things with SQL Server. The site is run by a husband and wife team, Sean and Jen McCown, called MidnightDBA, check it out.
Also, if you are around late friday evenings they also host a live web show called DBAs@Midnight, where numerous DBAs congregate to chat and interject on topics discussed by Sean and Jen, myself included.
Oh I almost forgot, their newest project is called DBA Roadmap, which is very exciting for the SQL Community. In this project they will outline how to become a good DBA with great career and learning resources.
Enjoy!
Indelible Marks
On the first break of day four of the SQLskills.com Immersion Event training, I am contemplating the indelible mark this training has left on my career. Every training should leave a mark, hopefully for the better and hopefully not a scar.
From this training, I have learned too many things to quantify into one blog, but there are two quotes that will probably never leave my career:
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!”
And the quote that followed most questions asked in the class: “…it depends!” which was followed with at least two opposing view points depending upon the situation.
These two quotes have really changed my perspective on how I answer or solve problems on a day to day basis. Instead of taking a limited, mostly narrow focus based upon my knowledge and experience, I should take a more encompassing approach based upon the problem and the ramifications of the various solutions. How do you approach your DBA problems?
Enjoy!
Do You Value Training?
Today is the first day of my SQLskills.com Immersion training, thus I prepared this blog post a few days ago.
If you have been reading my blog, then you should be able to surmise that I love learning. Being in the IT field, I am not sure how you can get by without training because of the speed at which technology changes. Luckily, my current employer also believes in and values training. When they ask me if I want to go to training, I submit three or four different classes. Of course, they do not all get approved, but all they can do is say no. Thus, it is worth the effort on my part and it demonstrates my committment to my career.
Do you value training? Are you taking advantage of the training opportunities provided by your employer?
If the budget is tight, there is no reason why you cannot attend many of the free webinars, code camps, SQL Saturdays, and especially local users groups. If you are not advancing your skills, then maybe technology is not the right field for you. So sign up for training. Go! Do it now!
Enjoy!
Saturday SQL Schoolhouse
SQL Schoolhouse!
In our final installment of the Saturday SQL Schoolhouse for February and in anticipation of the 24 Hours of PASS for Spring 2012, I wanted to share the Fall 2011 Recordings for the 24 Hours of PASS. This is an excellent and comprehensive training resource on 24 different one-hour long topics. Check it out and don’t forget to sign up for the Spring version.
Enjoy!
I’m So Excited and I Just Can’t Hide It!
The next couple of weeks are going to me huge in my SQL Server career. Next week I will be attending the SQLskills.com Immersion Training for Internals & Performance. There are no words to express my excitement about this training as I don’t think I can truly comprehend how much I will be learning and moving my career into overdrive. As I move towards the MCITP, and quite possibly towards the MCM or Microsoft Certified Master, this training will move me along in my journey into the BIG TIME!
The following week, I will be standing up two new SQL Server 2008 R2 clusters for a huge project that will impact the future of SQL Server in my organization. This is a pivotal project and it is my first time standing up clusters on my own as I have maintained clusters but never built them on my own. For this reason, we have asked our Microsoft Premier Field Engineer to assist and I will be soaking up her knowledge as we build a solid production and acceptance cluster environments. If that project is successful, we will then look to move more of our Oracle systems to SQL Server and my plan for world domination will be set in motion.
And finally on the week after that we will be meeting with Microsoft again to discuss our plans to move to SQL Server 2012 and help management understand the new pricing structure. Hopefully we will be able to move forward and onto the next version of SQL Awesomeness. These next three weeks will be pivotal for my career, time to dominate! Enjoy!
Backup and Recovery
On the drive in this morning, I was reflecting on what I needed to go over with my junior DBA today in his learning path (channeling Yoda). Backup and Recovery is so vitally important to what we do on a daily basis that I really need to drive that home to him. Therefore, I thought it would be a good topic to discuss and to blog about.
Then I remembered attending a Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter) webinar recently by Red Gate concerning this very same topic. If you missed the webinar, don’t worry as they put it up for all to see. There is really no need for me to reinvent the wheel here especially when Grant does it much better than I would. Thanks, Grant. Enjoy!
Saturday SQL Schoolhouse
SQL Schoolhouse!
Today’s installment of the Saturday SQL Schoolhouse is brought to you by our fine friends over at SQLCat, the Microsoft SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. I thought their post on Storage Top Ten Best practices would be a great learning opportunity. Enjoy!
SQL Server Customer Advisory Team – SQL Server Best Practices.
SQL Swampland 