Safety Gear is Dangerous!
July 3, 2016
Last year, I cut my thigh with a chainsaw at my farm. Except I was okay because I had the right protective gear on. Â I started thinking about that today again while doing a quick chore with the chainsaw. Had that moment of “Hmm.. Do I get the chaps or not for a simple cut”
DBA Lessons From a Snowy Winter
February 19, 2015
I live in New England. I expect snow in the winter. This winter, though, has been a bit of an anomaly from recent winters for us. We started out with very little snow, abnormally little snow. But then it came (and it is still coming) all at once. Over about 4ish weeks we had a
kCura’s k-rad Idea & A Vendor Doing SQL Better
October 15, 2014
k-rad.. K  From kilobyte.. A thousand.. A thousand times Rad.. Back when a 40MB hard drive was perhaps average or maybe around the time of those big 1.6GB hard drives, it meant “really cool”.. Maybe today it would ex-rad or p-rad. Anyway. There’s a reason for this trip down BBS or mIRC memory lane.. We’ll get
Hey DBA Managers, Don’t Be Like the Secret Service!
October 2, 2014
Continuing from yesterday’s advice to DBAs…  Three Four (hey it’s for managers, brownie points…) lessons for management from the Secret Service “issues”. Trust But Verify At the White House “upper management” at Secret Service didn’t realize how bad things were with recent lapses. At least I hope they didn’t and I’m going to assume they
Hey DBAs, Don’t Be Like the Secret Service!
October 1, 2014
Last week, I ripped a story from the headlines to draw lessons for Technologists from – it was about the Secret Service lapses that allowed a fence jumper to get into the threshold of the White House residence. That was bad. This week, though, we’ve learned of some additions to the story that makes it
How to Set Up SQL Server Alerts and Know if SQL Server is Healthy [Quick Tip]
September 30, 2014
SQL Server alerts let you know what is happening on your instance. They let you become a proactive DBA and know about problems potentially before your users do. If you don’t have a monitoring tool and it isn’t in the budget right now, setting up and monitoring SQL Server alerts is a free and very
DBA Reminders from an FAA Fire
September 29, 2014
Last Friday a long time employee set fire to the FAA’s Chicago Control Center. You can read about the fire and the 2,000+ flight cancellations that resulted  here and here. Keeping with the spirit of ripping lessons from headlines like I did in last week’s learning communication skills lesson from a police shooting, I think there are some lessons us
4 Attitudes I Wish I Had Earlier as a DBA
August 27, 2014
Outside of Work is Really Important This one is first and longest  for a reason. Time – it keeps going. It doesn’t pause while you have a busy month at the office. That means the things that matter the most in life keep happening. Whether you are there or not. Right now. Right this moment – especially
More Soft Skills From The Ambulance
August 14, 2014
A couple days ago I posted some of the lessons I learned in the back of an ambulance that have translated into my career as a SQL Server Consultant or a DBA. I promised I had a few more.  Here they are. “I Don’t Know What You’ve Been Through” Empathy. My friend Tom LaRock wrote an
5 Database Lessons From The Bathroom…
December 27, 2013
I’m writing this post from my living room, don’t worry. A recent last-minute trip to replenish the household toilet paper supply had me thinking of this illustration. So… I’m a big fan of finding lessons for the day job from everyday life – call them illustrations, if you want. I’ve found inspiration preparing for planting