PhilM99 (3/8/2013)
I'm a developer and an 'Accidental DBA'. These forums have saved my a%$ more times than I can count. I am always struck by the accuracy and helpfulness seen here. So I don't write because it's forever, and it's embarassing to have your inexperienced posts stuck up there forever. The competition from some of the main contributors is awesome, I mean they're not really competing, but the bar is set really high. And being a one-man-shop, I just really want to know how to make it work, with some degree of efficiency.Like Backup. I just want my databases to be reasonably well protected. But there are so many options one can barely read the documentation. I'm like many others, when I Google for something and see one of the links is MSDN documentation, I shy away from it, knowing it will present EVERYTHING about the subject, leaving me nowhere except to muddle through it all.
Some of my experiences are hilarious, I wish I would keep notes. One time I was Googling for a solution to a db problem and hit an entry that sounded exactly like the problem I was having. The more I read, the more it sounded the same. And there it was, I had posted almost the exact same thing three years earlier, totally forgetting.
So why don't I write: My experiences constantly teach me: YOU KNOW NOTHING!
The more I know, the more I know nothing. More specifically, there are three levels of knowledge: Things you know, things you know you don't know, and things you don't know that you don't know. The more I learn about SQL Server for instance, I increase that which is in the first bucket. The problem is I keep putting more in the second bucket. I have no idea how much is still in the third.
Writing helps you move things from the third buck to the second and the second to the first.