Category Archives: Professional Development

Time for a Change

Posted by on 2013/01/08 9 comments

This past year has been a year of changes for me.

Throughout this year I’ve been very blessed to develop some close friendships within the SQL Community that I don’t take for granted. So thanks to everyone who invited or at least put up with me.

However the changes aren’t done yet. I began my career at Magenic in March of 2007 and after almost 6 years of employment I have decided it’s time for a change. I came to Magenic looking for new technological as well as business challenges and Magenic did not disappoint. I cannot state enough how much I have enjoyed both professionally as well as personally my time at Magenic.. I have no problem recommending it as a place of employment and hope to maintain many of the relationships that I made while employed there. In fact this was a very difficult decision to make primarily due to the people and the Magenic “family”. However effective Friday, January 4, I resigned.

A New Chapter

Beginning on Monday, January 7, I began work at Huron Consulting Group, specifically as a Database Solutions Architect within the Legal Practice working on Electronic Discovery Solutions. What is E-Discovery?  Imagine party A has a legal matter against party B, such as a lawsuit. Once the framework for that legal matter is decided upon, there is a process of discovery. This is basically a phase where both parties share information about the legal matter. Now the process of “discovering” that information to share can be fairly complex, time-consuming and expensive. Imagine all your company’s data – email, server shares, server logs, laptop hard drives, desktop hard drives, etc. – something and usually someone, must go through the data to see what needs to be shared.

There are certainly some very difficult challenges such as using technology to reduce the amount of documents that need to be reviewed by a lawyer – through identifying and removing duplicates along with keyword and semantic analysis. Once it’s reviewed by a lawyer, that lawyer will mark up the document in a number of different ways to indicate it should be shared, redacted or other things. So we are talking about large amounts of data, data movements, reports and analytics – both to fulfill the client needs as well as what’s behind the process for Huron to determine things like capacity, velocity, cost and other metrics to drive their our business. I’m excited about this move as I’m expecting this will provide many challenges and opportunities to learn.

Here’s to a new year, a new chapter and a new challenge.

Do you want to be the best?

Posted by on 2011/10/25 No comments

If you’re into sports or any type of serious competition, you’ve probably heard the phrase:

If you want to be the best, you need to beat the best

The reason this is important is that we often don’t know what we are truly capable of until pushed to our limits.  To get pushed to our limits we need to be challenged by something or someone that will cause us to stretch further and get outside of our comfort zone.  By definition this isn’t a relaxed, comfortable situation.  That’s how we get better.  On the flip side it is said of teams that are up and down:

they play to the level of their competition

As SQL Server professionals it’s easy to play to the level of our competition (i.e., our current data environment).  I don’t know how many times I’ve interviewed someone with 7+ years experience with SQL Server that considers themselves a senior person, when in fact they have just had the same one year experience, 7 times.

So while attending Are you a Linchpin? Career Management Lessons to Help You Become Indispensible, I posed the question to the panel: during the ebbs and flows of their careers, how do they keep challenging and pushing themselves?

Kevin (twitter | blog) restated the question succinctly this way:

  • Year 1 – Focus on Reliability/Standardization
  • Year 2 – Focus on Optimization
  • Year 3 – Focus on Automation
  • Year 4 – Focus on lolcats (ok so Kevin didn’t specifically say lolcats)

And the question is what to do year 4.  First was a motivation discussion surrounding the concept of what you do today is a down payment on tomorrow

Then came a couple suggestions:

  • Ask for additional problems within your company that need solving
  • Review things you worked on before, the idea being that your better now than you were 3 years ago (referencing the example above), go back and improve those first scripts you created

So let’s change 1 word of the quote to make it applicable:

If you want to be the best, you need to beat the your best

While this is more applicable, this is a tough nut to crack, and I’m always interested in how people deal with this situation.  Some people create extensive labs to be able to test a multitude scenarios, some people create projects on codeplex, while others might attempt to attain some uber-certification.  The point is to continually challenge yourself and improve.

As part of this discussion, it’s important to understand how you learn.  Personally, I learn best through discussion and just doing it.  I don’t learn well from a class nor from a book.  For me, classes are when I don’t even know where to begin and I use books mainly for reference.  However I have known people that learn best by books, in fact I had a developer once that was able to sit by himself in the corner with a book and learn a new language in a week!

For me, this is why we have community.  The discussion.  Events like SQLPASS, SQLSaturday and local user groups along with tools like twitter and blogging can produce great discussions and out of those discussions can come creativity and ideas that challenge assumptions or opens your eyes to additional possibilities.

So how do you beat your best?

SQLPASS Conference Day 3, the Last Day

Posted by on 2011/10/18 1 comment

The Final day of the conference began with Rob Farley (twitter | blog) and Buck Woody (twitter | blog) singing a Rob Farley original “I Should have Looked the Other Way” which you can see here (audio compression issues), for the performance or here for the lyrics version (start at 2:20).

Next up was board announcements such as Wayne Snyder and Rick Heiges both rolling off the board.  While they were bringing Wayne up on stage they were showing quotes from people within the community about Wayne, all of which were very moving, however the one that I thought really stood out was about (and I apologize that I didn’t catch who said it) how Wayne transformed SQLPASS from a technical conference into a family reunion.

Keynote

Then onto the final keynote done by Dr. David DeWitt (site), you can download his presentation here (this is a summary of that presentation, if you are really interested, go download it or better yet, watch it).  Dr. DeWitt was a professor for years and has mastered the ability of explaining complex concepts.  During the presentation we were able to email questions which were answered after the presentation.  Today he decided to tackle Big Data.

In 2009 there was 0.8 Zettabyte (ZB) (1 million petabytes/1 trillion terabytes/1 quadrillion GB) and by the years 2020 the expectation is to have 35 ZBs (growth factor of 44).  That’s a lot of data, much of it coming from sources such as sensors, Web2.0, Web clicks, etc.  However much of this data while valuable to store, we don’t necessarily care about ACID properties or relational integrity or other things that would utilize a traditional RDBMS. Point being as always, right tool for the right job.

So in these cases, what is the right tool?  Well with Wednesday’s announcement, looks like Microsoft is putting their weight behind Hadoop and MapReduce, which offers:

  • Scalability and a high degree of fault tolerance
  • Ability to quickly analyze massive collections of records without forcing data to first be modeled, cleansed and loaded
  • Easy to use programming paradigm for writing and executing analysis programs that scale to 1000s of nodes and PBs of data
  • Low up front software and hardware costs

So what’s the system look like:

image

  1. Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) –  objectives are load balancing, fact access and fault tolerance, designed with the expectations that hardware/software failures
  2. MapReduce – framework for writing/executing distributed, fault tolerant algorithms – 2 functions map which divided a large problem into smaller problems and then performs the same function on all smaller problems and reduce which then combines the results.
  3. Hive & Pig – Hive was created by Facebook as a and is SQL-like, while Pig was created by Yahoo and is more procedural; both target MapReduce jobs.  However due to the complexity of MapReduce, HiveQL was created to combine the best features of SQL with MapReduce
  4. Sqoop – package for moving data between HDFS and relational DB systems via command line load and unload utilities

He then showed some performance metrics of SQL PDW and stated

I assert that it is MUCH easier to add support to SQL Server PDW for unstructured data (w/o having to load it), improved scalability, and fault tolerance than it is to ever get competitive performance from a Hadoop-based system

But again the point being that both of these type of systems (RDBMS and Hadoop)  are going to be working together, it will not be a case of choosing one or the other.

Sessions

After the keynote I sat in Adam Machanic’s (twitter | blog) Query Tuning Mastery for a bit before going downstairs to host the “SSIS for all, DBAs developers, etc.” table at the Birds of a Feather luncheon with Matt Masson (twitter | blog).  Ted Krueger (twitter | blog) had to leave leave early and Mike Walsh (twitter | blog) was looking for volunteers.  Had some good conversation ranging from “What is SSIS” to “How do I do meta-driven SSIS”

After that I jumped into Rewrite Your T-SQL for Great Good by Jeremiah Peschka (twitter | blog).  Jeremiah’s slides as always excellent, and I have a similar presentation entitled Writing Professional Database Code so I figured I’d go and borrow check it out.  I was glad I did as it had a different focus and perspective.  This just underscored to me again that each person brings their own experiences and perspective which is valuable.  In all honesty it is a common excuse that I used (as well as others) as to why I couldn’t present or blog, because the content was already out there.   So lesson learned again, stop making excuses. SmileAnyway he talked about consistency and gave a link to open source Unit Testing tools.  As a user of TFS, I haven’t had much experience with these and look forward to investigating them.  He gave a lot of query performance options and even threw down the gauntlet for everyone who uses “Distinct” in a query to explain the necessity of it as most of the times it’s used due to either a bad data model or bad joins.  Great stuff!

Last I went to Are you a Linchpin? Career Management lessons to help you become indispensable.  This was a panel discussion with Q&A at the end Linchpin: Are You Indispensable by Seth Godin as the starting point of the discussion.  The panel was made up of:

One of the interesting things that Kevin said (attributing credit to Brent) was that

People are going to remember you for 1, 2, maybe 3 adjectives.  What adjectives do you want to be known for?

My mother had always told me something similar:

People won’t remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel

Anyway it was a great conversation with some interesting Q&A, would love to see more of these type of things.

Whew, that’s it for the summit, had a great time and looking forward to next years!