Well, I've been tagged. SQLBatman has tagged me to post my New Years Resolutions. I have so much room for professional development I'm not sure where to start. So I'll start with some pain points. So here they are:
I get the occasional question from our Oracle DBAs on how do you do this in MSSQL. Usually I have little to no idea, so I do what all new DBAs do: Look it up. Well, this situation came up today on how can I write a procedure that will query the table and give me all the enteries for today. The column the date is stored in is varchar in this format 11/14/2008. I found the answer is select convert(varchar,getdate(),101) So I thought I'd add the sytle ID numbers for future reference.
I was trying to be the good homeowner. It had been six months it was time to flush the water heater. The process was going flawlessly until I was starting to re-light the heater. I noticed a drip, drip, drip. There is nothing good that can come from that. I started to investigate. The shutoff valve to the heater input was dripping. I guess I was stronger than I though when I shut off the water. Then I realized I have lived in the house for 10 years and I didn't know where the main water shutoff was located. So I had to investigate. I followed the pipes to quickly find the shutoff. Once I had the water shut off, I took the broken valve apart and a few inches of telfon tape later, the drip stopped. The water is heating up and I lived to blog about it.
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No trackbacksDolphins win the AFC East. From last to first in one season!!!!
Congratulations Dolphins.
Write a commentNo trackbacksI was reading a post by T.J. Belt where he listed 16 things about him. It was quite interesting. He has had quite an interesting life. So here are my 16
Write a commentNo trackbacksA few weeks ago the three DBAs at our company were discussing our lack of decent, usable documentation of all the quirky things we have had to do keep our system running. We had a few choices on how we would do this, we could use our company knowledge base, we could continue the unorganized mess of our team directory on a file server, we could build a wiki and use full text search to find things. We ran into some procedural/political issues with using the company knowlege base. The team directory was a bigger project than anyone wanted tackle. So I downloaded a MediaWiki virtual appliance and had our VMware admin install it on an ESX server and we were good to go. Another DBA spent some time building some templates so we can try to keep the knowledge in standardized format. This will be a very interesting experiment. I'd be interested to hear how others organize their databse knowledge.
Along with our two dogs, we are dog sitting for my brother-in-law as his family is out of the state. Shipley, their German Shepard is a really good dog. It has been fun watcing the dynamics of the dogs. My dog Zoe, American Staffordshire Terrior mix, has assumed the role as alpha female. This gives her the unique opportunity to be left out when the two shepards play. But since she is fairly lazy, that doesn't bother her too much. Right now they are all lying down surrounding me. It's pretty peaceful in the house right now. My shepard/akita mix, Belle, is lying beside me asking for attention. That does make blogging a bit more difficult. My wife and kids are watching «Journey to the Center of the Earth» with Brandon Frazier again. Yes, you can guess why my wife is watching it.
Yep, another SQL Server admin is throwing his words into the ring. My path to DBAdom did not take the developer to DBA track. My trail came from the systems side. I started as a NetWare administrator, then spearheaded the Visine project (Get the 'red' out) . Then I moved into Windows/Citrix administration. Our Linux administrator moved onto greener pastures and I was asked to take over that administration. That was a really cool assignment especially when VMware fell under that umbrella. I architected our virtual environment that took us into the leading edge in virtualization at that time. After I got that environment a smooth running machine we lost our two MS SQL DBAs. I was asked to replace these two very talented individuals. I am currently working on consolidating as many of our databases and well as keeping all the existing servers running smoothly. I am also working on implementing a wiki for my DBA team to attempt to standardize our documentation.
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