Sharpen Something

In case you missed it (many did), TSQL Tuesday was a challenging event this month. I invited people to do a put a little more into writing a post than what they may usually do. There were some very good reasons for this. If you are interested, take a look back at the invite and see if you maybe want to give it a go outside the bounds of TSQL Tuesday. You can check out the original post here.

Before I get into the nitty gritty I have a confession. This topic was a reminder for myself as much as it was a challenge to others to help me continue to drive and improve in various areas as I see fit.

There are other dirty little secrets too. Some may become apparent as you read through the recap.

Recap of the Event

One of the tricks to becoming and staying a top tier data talent or professional is a perpetual cycle to learn, adapt, change, and evolve. We must be in a continual cycle of self evaluation and self modification. Let’s call this by something else – we must be agile. There I said the five letter word. Think about it in broad strokes with your career – it is a development process with perpetual evaluation, review and tweaks.

Now think about the invite and see how that fits with what I just said or with the, cough cough, agile flow. You start (albeit very basically) with a need for enhancement, then you plan which pieces of the enhancement you can accomplish, you then do the work (whether successful or not), then after you deliver the work you conclude with a retrospective (what went well and what needs to change). Yes! I do feel rather dirty for sneaking this on everybody like this. That said, when you think about the model and apply it in broad strokes to your career path – it has merit.

Another way of viewing this is to think in terms of the following flowchart to help improve your personal mindset or maybe improve your personal mental power. The process is repetitive and follows a natural course. Once you have acted on some plan, you must review the performance and results and then gauge where your mindset needs to go from there to improve.

In other Words

Did you just look at the picture or did you explore the picture? If you hover the picture, you will find there are links to this months participants. There were only eight so not a ton of exploration is necessary.

Here are my thoughts on each of the posts submitted this month:

Wayne Sheffield (blog | twitter) – You can find his link in the big arrow that restarts the cycle. I put his link here because he ran into a ton of blockers during his experiment and he is at a spot of practically restarting – again. This is not the first time he has restarted in his quest to learn more about Availability Groups. Wayne fully admits he is deficient in AG and states near the end of the post that he had to humble himself going through this exercise. That is awesome! We could all use a little humility on a more regular basis.

Mala Mahadevan (blog | twitter) – You can find her link in the “Results” circle. The reason for this choice is that Mala discusses her midlife crisis – erm career change. Mala held out for quite a while looking for just the right opportunity. When it came, she snatched it up. Along with that career change, she has implemented a plan to become more active in blogging and to learn more and more through various avenues. The increase in blogging and the ability to stick to her guns resulted in a new job/career she seems to be happy with at the moment.

Robert Davis (blog | twitter) – Robert found himself placed in the performance circle thanks to his article involving a third party backup utility that should be heavy on the performance side. Robert needed something interesting to push him to reacquaint himself with this tool. Once he found that project that required just a touch of ingenuity, performance and a way to avoid the GUI, Robert found himself right at home with a great solution for his environment.

Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan (blog | twitter) – Kennie landed in the Actions node mostly because he decided to take the challenge and act on his long time desire to get better at the new temporal features. To do that, he decided to read a book by Snodgrass which seriously sounded like something from Harry Potter to me. Kennie outlines a bunch of information that he learned from the book such as tracking time based data from either a transaction or valid-time perspective.

Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter) – I placed this one into the behavior node. Maybe it is a bit of a stretch, but it seems to make sense since he discussed some behavioral differences between Azure DB and SQL Server. Things just do not work exactly the same between the two. You will need to understand these differences if you find yourself in a spot where you must work with both.

Steve Jones (blog | twitter) – When looking through the image, you will find that Steve landed solidly in the mindset node. When I read his contribution, I got the full impression that his mind was 100% in the right place. He set out to learn something and try to get better at it. Additionally, he blogged about a topic that is near and dear to me – Extended Events. Have I mentioned before that I have a lot of content about XE? You can read a bunch of it here. Like Wayne, Steve was humble near the end of his article. He notes that he was clumsy as he started working with XE but that he is glad he did it as well. Read his article. He gave me a great idea of another use for XE and I am sure it may sound good to you too!

Rob Farley (blog | twitter) – I planted Rob firmly on the attitude node. It seems clear to me that Rob had loads of attitude throughout his article about Operational Analytics. The attitude I perceived was that of humility and yearning. Rob feels like he has a lot to learn and his attitude is in the right place it seems to keep him going while he tries to learn more in the field of Operational Analytics.

My Contribution link can be found by clicking on any spot in the image that is not already described. I wrote about my experiences with trying to pick up a little on JSON.

That is a wrap of all eight contributions. If you did not contribute this month, I recommend that you still try to do something with the challenge issued with this months TSQL Tuesday.

Edit: Added links to the articles with each persons name in the event this page is being viewed with Firefox. There seems to be an issue with the links in the image map within Firefox.