I got started in SQL Server and databases as a bit of an accident several years ago. I worked at a company where I was the primary application support person and dabbled in SSMS to review issues when a customer’s loan didn’t go through. As the age-old joke goes, I knew just enough to be dangerous. While I was there, I decided to keep learning about SQL from the DBA team and when that company went out of business, I was able to pivot and apply for DBA roles, and I eventually found my way here to Straight Path. Part of how I was able to do that was that I was able to see the writing on the wall and learn that there was opportunity in SQL and data.
With that being said, we at Straight Path pride ourselves on proactivity and helping customers to determine what they might need. So, as you may have guessed by the title, this is a blog post about PostgreSQL and some things I’ve learned about it and why I never want to stop being a beginner.
If you’re new to us, Straight Path is a SQL and Database consulting firm started by our CEO Mike Walsh. We’re now at 22 employees and we have backgrounds in performance tuning, migration work, security, and just general DBA knowledge spread out across our Senior and Support teams. There isn’t much we can’t handle as an organization. Our new CDO, Buck Woody, in the spirit of proactivity has seen the writing on the wall as well and knows that our next logical step was Postgres since it’s getting more popular than ever. DBAs and organizations around the world are turning to Postgres for its customization, its easy licensing, and resource management.
I’ve built my career in Microsoft but my OS of choice for my personal projects is Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and is part of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) project. I learned about Linux and the different operating systems built around it when I was fresh out of high school, through my uncle who had been using Linux almost since its inception. I was amazed that so many humans across the world could come together on a project like this and that Linux was responsible for so many things in our lives. Now it’s on billions of devices and runs critical infrastructure that we depend on. I’m saying all of this to emphasize that it’s my passion for being a beginner that got me into Linux in the first place, and that same passion brought me to being a DBA, and now it’s helping me to learn Postgres.
As the title suggests, I didn’t set out to be a DBA, I originally went to school for programming. That job I mentioned earlier hired me partially for my ability to read code. My boss at the time assumed that if I could read C# then I must have been able to read whatever language the company’s software was written in and that would help me in my support role. He wasn’t totally wrong because that light programming background allowed me to talk with the developers and try to understand what we were building. It helped me make relationships that I still maintain today and that ability to be a beginner let me ask questions. I asked questions about everything because it’s how I soak up information. Asking those questions eventually got me pointed to the DBA team because I wanted to know why something wasn’t working, and development eventually pointed the finger at the DBAs. As we all know, DBA does stand for “Default Blame Accepter”.
I started working closely with them and learning anything and everything I could. Eventually that company was going under and I needed to find new work and I found Straight Path. I wanted to take the DBA knowledge I had to the next level because I wanted to be a beginner somewhere else and before I knew it, I was. I was learning the ropes of SQL Agent, jobs and maintenance plans, users and access, and how to troubleshoot issues. Fast forward 5 years and I’ve grown into my role as a DBA where I maintain a list of my own clients and I assist our Senior team with their clients where I can. I focus on proactive work and maintaining a well performing environment while also looking for opportunities to enhance security. The world is only getting less secure these days, and I started all this by being a beginner at something.
Here I am now, relearning a lot of those same principles but in a new environment with new challenges and new goals. Postgres is a great tool and even though it can do so much for your environment and your workflows, it may or may not be the right tool for your needs.
Postgres is also considered FOSS, and it’s maintained by a dedicated group of people around the world and provided for free in most cases. That philosophy is also part of what brought me to learning it and wanting to use it, as it was like getting to learn about Linux with my uncle all over again.
So, this is a roundabout way of saying that you shouldn’t ever stop being a beginner at something. I took my passion for learning and started with Windows 98 as a kid, then in my teens learned about Linux, then as an adult I found my career with Microsoft software, and now we’re going back to Linux to build out this Postgres plan. More on that to come!