Do You Have the Gifts to Be a DBA?

I recently had the pleasure of catching Paul McCartney in concert, and he was amazing. I have been a fan forever and have heard him tell the same stories he over and over with great delight. A familiar tale he tells is about when he wrote the song Yesterday. He woke up with the tune in his head, and put words to it: Scrambled Eggs, oh my baby how… Ok, so the words changed a little. But you can’t dispute he has an amazing gift for music, and he wasn’t trained as a musician and doesn’t even read music.

I know DBAs and programmers that have such gifts with computers. They have the innate ability to write the code to solve problems in their sleep, in any language, and seemingly were born knowing how to solve technical problems. Some of these people are ten years old and can just bang out code that I am not even able to understand (and I have had something of a solid career in programming myself.) If you were born with such gifts, be thankful, and use them to help the rest of us.

On the other side of the coin, is the aforementioned “rest of us,” ranging from slightly gifted to well, slightly south of clueless. I fit squarely in the last group when I first went to college. I was skill-less, other than being a super-fast burger flipper, but I desired a civil engineering degree. I wanted to build bridges like the Linn Cove Viaduct at Grandfather Mountain in NC. Then I failed out of engineering classes. Then on to math, where I accumulated the minimum GPA to get a degree, which I realized probably wasn’t going to get me employed in the math factory. Finally, I found computer science which I was slightly better at than I was at math, but only maybe in the middle of my class, if that.

My life changed when, back in the early 1990s, I became one of the first accidental DBAs. At the time, I was a LAN admin on Novell, and I was again clueless. I knew just a bit more than how to reboot the server to fix problems, but only just a bit more. This still pretty much describes my current networking skills with Wi-Fi. Then I received the gift that would change my life. Our IT group went to a conference named COMDEX and learned about this new product: SQL Server. The other member of the team started working on a mainframe replacement. A person I worked with quit, leaving a database programmer shaped hole in our company, and I did double duty for a while. I never looked back.

When I first got started, I was terrible. We didn’t have user groups or small conferences, but I had a manager who forced me to do a good job at building parts of our database, teaching me normalization in a way that made sense well enough but wasn’t quite enough for me. It made me dig deeper and deeper into the materials that were available at the time. Probably the most significant gift I received when my next manager said the only way you will ever get to go to conferences at the nonprofit I worked at, was speaking at the conference. I was the only person on the team that took him up on it. I spoke at a Computer Associates conference on Erwin that year. After I left there (temporarily), I ended up at the second PASS conference, where I met a publisher and asked if anyone wrote a good book on database design. He said, “Why don’t you?”

The gifts keep coming and only increase in the great conferences that I attend every year, the blogs I read, and even the great tweets from the community. You would be amazed at how so many people have contributed to getting me where I am today, some purposefully to help me, some just putting stuff out there, some pointing out when I have been wrong (often very wrong) over the years. Sometimes gifts hurt.

If you aren’t a natural, the fact that you found this blog means you have some idea where to start. A lot of gifts aren’t addressed to you specifically. Most are just thrown out into the ether to share with everyone. Count the gifts you have received from the community, coworkers, family, parents, whoever got you where you are today. And these gifts are not for hoarding. Regift as often as you can. Share with a user group. Write a blog. Contribute to Twitter’s #sqlhelp, volunteer for a local non-computer organization, or whatever you can do. I can barely count the number of people that I have seen join the community and thrive (often leaving me in the dust!) It will be worth it for you, for the community and possibly me.

Louis Davidson (@drsql)

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

Redgate has just published the 2019 State of SQL s...

As estates continue to grow and evolve, SQL Server professionals must continually adapt. But do you really know what’s happening with your servers? Jamie Wallis highlights the 4 key elements that are currently impacting the working life of an IT leader. Find out what they are here.

Click to learn more about author Karthik Ramasamy...

This month, I have just done minor updates to most...

In 2016 I created the Max Server Memory Matrix as...

Randolph West looks at a new settings tab in the S...

Jon Shaulis builds a logon trigger to notify when ...

David Fowler has a new stored procedure for you: W...

Randolph West notes a change with SQL Server 2019:...

Recently I was helping a customer who hired me for...

Welcome to this post, on SQL Server 2008 and 2008 ...

Welcome back to The Ironic DBA Files, a series whe...

Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s highly scalable, NoSQL database platform running in Azure. It supports four API models, including Key-Value pair and Documents. Pushpa Sekhara provides an overview of Cosmos DB, including some best practices to improve performance.

The purpose of an Elastic Job is to execute a T-SQ...

This story started a few years ago, in a very non ...

Click to learn more about author Neil Barton. Volu...

There is quite a bit of suffering within tech and caused by tech, from poorly commented code to shaming someone who asks a question on a forum. In this article, Samuel Nitsche explains why compassionate coding is a better way to go.

If you are a Windows shop, Windows Server is still...

Microsoft is introducing a new Azure feature that ...

Click to learn more about author Harald Smith. The...

We hear 'edge' a lot, from browsers to data center...

Over the last year we’ve seen a shift in customer concerns around personal data, as well as new legislation. Now is the time to implement a robust process to safeguard your data and your business, without hindering your DevOps journey. Read this blog post to find out the next steps for data privacy.

About ten years ago, a software vendor with whom m...

Today, more organisations are adopting DevOps over older, traditional practices. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains DevOps and compares it to Waterfall and Agile methodologies.

PRODUCT TREND ANALYSIS: Thanks to improvements, su...

I am writing this post 10 Jul 2019. Yesterday, sup...

Enjoy the recording of the free Azure Data Factory...

This is the final post of a series, Short Cuts to ...

Most of the times I use the CSV files whenever I n...

I recently hit this rather interesting issue when ...

A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announce...

Microsoft is rolling back changes to its partner p...

Introduction The Clustered Index Seek operator use...

Hugo Kornelis gives us a great deal of information...

Goal Posts When you’re measuring query changes t...

Implicit transactions are a hell of a bad idea in ...

Only official documentation which I could find was...

The problem of blank values being shown in a Power...

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how you can add line ...

Paul Turley shows how you can drill through from a...

Imke Feldmann has a lengthy Power Query script to ...

Matt Allington shows how you can create a combinat...

Ever struggled with a formula in DAX that does not...

Matthew Roche (with an assist from Imke Feldmann) ...

Welcome to our continuing series that Erin Ostrows...

This is actually part 2 of a process I am creating...

At one of my clients I received an email from one ...

Every so often I set out to create new resources i...

Kenneth Fisher walks through the Show-Command cmdl...

Why do I take pictures of screens at conferences? ...

David Smith has a review of Microsoft’s R roadma...

Integration is the process of evaluating integrals. It is one of the two central ideas of calculus and is the inverse of the other central idea of calculus, differentiation...

Julia Silge announces a new package, tidylo: The p...

I was talking recently with a friend about feature...

Security is one of the most important requirements...

In order to take advantage of R and Python (and Ja...

K. Brian Kelley notes a slew of patches for July: ...

dbatools and linux As a long-time Linux user and o...

For the most part, things work the way you might e...

Itzik Ben-Gan describes nested window functions an...

Testing is a challenging yet crucial part of software development, but how do you know that a test is telling you what you need to know? In this article, Michael Sorens explores the concept of phantom tests that return correct results but don’t actually prove anything.

I know a bit about this, but I’m always looking ...

Docker compose is a great tool for easily deployin...

I’ve been working with containers and writing a ...