My Someday

I recently turned down an opportunity to be a DBA at a successful business. It was not for lack of purposed future salary or benefits. The job description looks like it would be fun and exciting. The job has more professional and monetary growth than my current position.

Someday

The opportunity was a contract-to-hire; I cannot afford to take that chance, not now, not with a mortgage, bills, and most importantly, my year and a half old son. The 45-minute commute, while trivial to some, was daunting to me, that is an extra hour and a half a day that I do not get to see my son.

Someday

The deal breaker was the contract-to-hire. I am happy where I am, I like my Somedays as they are now. I would give up everything to spend more time with my son, any Someday that has him in it, is worth whatever the cost. Two years ago, I would have taken the leap and gone after this job. That, that goes to show how much my Somedays have changed in the past two years.

Someday

My current job still has a metric tonne of interesting and fun stuffs to do. There is no want of projects to fill my workday. I am getting more in to report writing and giving users access to their data, so they can form their own spreadsheets, reports, and other business intelligence items. It seems like I have another Someday staring me in the face.

Thomas LaRock (w|t) gave a presentation about “Someday”, http://thomaslarock.com/someday/. I fully blame him for me declining. No, not really, his Someday speech was just a reaffirmation of my beliefs. I wanted to say “thank you”, most people my age, are about the drive to attain a goal(money, power, what have you), they miss the Somedays along the way.

T-SQL Tuesday #42–The Long and Winding Road

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us from Wendy Pastrick (Blog|Twitter). We are talking about how we got to where we are currently, and to where we are going. To wit, I will continue as if I Google mapped my life.

A: University graduation

B: Retirement

Suggested routes
Become a sys admin with pay scale $175K+ per year

Marry a woman with money have child(ren)

Become a lion tamer/carney

Life directions to System Administration, Michigan

                        This route has tolls

A. University Graduation

1.       Graduate Western Michigan University 5.5 yrs

2.      Get local assistant network manager position 10.5mo

3.      Stay in said position for a short time tolling event

4.      Follow with soon-to-be wife to new city

5.       Turn left with company as a temp  network administrator 6mo

6.      Merge with company as a full-time network administrator 3 yrs

7.       Create DBA tasks, and job duties. Become Accidental DBA

8.      Take detour

a.       Become a father to a beautiful baby boy tolling event

9.      Do not actively exit as Sr. network administrator. Shoulder more DBA work 2.5 yrs

10.   Stay with company, until company closure tolling event

11.    Stay to the right as systems administrator I with a local government ongoing

12.   Again, create DBA tasks and responsibilities

13.   Become “that guy that can do reports for us”

14.   Get interested in business intelligence

15.    Become the de-facto database guy, while keeping grounded in system administration

16.   ????

17.    PROFIT!!!1!!!!1

B. Retirement

As you can see by my directions, I have not fully taken the plunge into becoming an actual database administrator. I am torn between two worlds. I realize that soon, if not a year ago, I will have to make a decision. Stick with sys admin, or go with being a DBA.

I am not sure where the road leads, but I am excited to find out

T-SQL Tuesday #32

July 11^th

It was a sweltering hot day, the type of day that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. I got into work a few minutes early. I had started this job only 3 weeks ago, so I still have to make an impression. The agenda was a light for the day. I have been working on a project that was shelved until the company hired more help.

That is where I come in; I was hired to shoot some pool. The IT department had been a bit behind the eight ball before they hired me. I have been cruising along getting the lay of the land, figuring out what systems connected to what, and in which manner.

Since I have started, I’ve been asking questions. Questions people don’t like me asking. I’ve been poking around, asking why they are doing X, why not Y instead. There’s a lot of “we’ve been told by the vendor”.
Seems like I was on the right track.

I obtained the latest sp_blitz from the Bent Ozar PLF (w|t) crew, ran it on of on the production instances.

I ran through the results with a co-worker. He didn’t seem surprised.
I had looked down a long, hard road for the SQL environment.
I copped out, I’m not proud, but hey I’m the new kid on the block, I can’t rock the boat that much right now.

The company had tabled a workstation deployment, that was supposed to be done in conjunction with the switch over to an Active Directory environment. The AD infrastructure has been setup, a few minor tweaks and it would be ready for users.
There had already been a few cutovers of the populace, I guess I was one of them. I had no choice, I was told that I would have nothing to do with Novell Netware, that was fine by me. I had my run-ins with Netware a few years back, I was fond of it then, I am not fond of it now.

I started to crank out the new workstations, nice machines, i7 procs, 8GB DDR3. I had asked questions about the usage of these machines, what type of workstations that they would be replacing. Old Dell something-or-others were to be fed to the scrap pile.

Well, it’s about closing time, they are shutting off the lights, it’s getting dark in here.

Outside, it’s starting to rain.

(The events of the day have been fictionalized, however everything stated did take place, just not in the noir style. This is in response to Erin Stellato's T-SQL Tuesday announcement)

The End of the Beginning

For those of you whom I have never met or just haven't told, I have started a new job. Today was my first day. I went from being a Senior Network Administrator, to *egads* a Network Administrator I!
This is a good change, a scary change, but a good one. Lots of unknowns: people, technologies, different ways of doing things, SQL databases.
Learning the different tech is the easy part, much harder is getting the lay of the land dealing with the different personalities.

Onward to the great unknown

Chicken or the egg?

We’ve started the move to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. So begins the task of exportation of information and the resulting importation of said information. Sound easy enough, however both CRM 4.0 and 2011 don’t have the most…robust import/export feature set.

Off I start creating a report (remember, poor export tools) of all of our active accounts. Everything is going just fine, the export went well it was only a few accounts to test the process with, no big deal.

Start the import process in CRM2011, looks different, maybe this will be a better experience than the export. At step ‘n’ I map the fields in the export with the associated fields in CRM2011 that went nice and easy. So at this point, I am thinking that the import process for the contacts should go swimmingly as well.  I get to the “finish” screen for the importation. Click “run”. Navigate to the import status page, “failed”.

Damn

“Alright, must be a logic error that I missed”, I think to myself. I view the details of the failed import, yup, sure enough. The process bombed on the primary contact field. It is an option list, well seeing how there are no contacts in the CRM2011 yet, doesn’t really surprise me that it failed at import.

Damn

I go create the export report for the contacts. I start the import on the CRM2011 server. I pause.

Damn

I cannot import the contacts with the parent customer field mapped.

I suddenly had the urge for breakfast.

Went to the gang, told them that there was a hitch-in-the-giddy-up about whether to import accounts or contacts first. We decided that it was best to import accounts, not map primary contact. After they are imported go ahead and do the contacts. The downside is that the accounts won’t have a primary contact filled out. So we plan on filling the primary contacts in as we touch those accounts.

Has anyone found a way to programmatically import accounts with the associated primary contacts?

#mememonday

Thomas LaRock (w|t) actually came up with a #memeMonday writing assignment that I am able to participate in! His question seems innocuous enough, “if You today, had the chance to go back to You when you started your IT career, what advice would You (of today) tell You (of yesteryear)?”

First advice: Don’t worry about the time paradox that we would be creating, it’ll be fine.

Second: Listen to this, (point at my Boss) man he knows what he is talking about.

Third: Ask more questions, get more involved with projects, don’t just fill a role while at work, make one.

Fourth: Involve yourself more with the open source community, just because you aren't a programmer, doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to projects

Fifth: While you’re at it, learn a programming language it will help you in the long run when working with developers.

Sixth: Take this sports almanac, put it to good use.

So the major gist of our talk would be to learn more about the things that pique your interest, dive deeper in the subjects. Ask questions, learn from people who know more than you.

Already? Sheesh, that was quick.

Great, just as I was getting the hang of SQL 2008R2 (still no luck getting the hang of Thursday), 2012 has come out (with CU1 being released just a few weeks ago). I was one of the many whom waited with bated breath for the virtual launch event and watched in awe of the fail. I am excited for the new features, especially the Always On, Availability Groups. With 2012 database mirroring is going the way of the stage coach. Which puts a huge crimp in my HA/DR plans. Currently I am utilizing mirroring with TDE, which I have yet to find any documentation on how to use TDE with AG. Granted I looked days after release, so I am hoping that there is more out there on the intertubes now. I am also looking at the newest interface for “power users” for data modeling and the SharePoint/SSRS integration.

We upgraded to 2008R2 almost a year ago now, what I have to decide is if it is worth the upgrade to 2012 so soon. I will have to talk with our developer(s) and have them check out any of new developer tools or enhancements and see if they think it is worth it. I would like to stay fairly current with our database infrastructure. I have to worry about the changes to the licensing model.

I also have to make sure that our various internal programs and 3^rd party software will be compatible with the newest version. With the current shift that is going on in house, I have to at least make sure that MS Dynamics CRM 2011 works fully with SQL 2012. I am sure it will, but with Dynamics soon to be the center of business, I cannot afford to go with “I’m sure everything will work”.