What Makes a Great Database Professional?
I think a good database professional knows their domain inside and out. Whether you are a classic production support DBA, a SQL developer, an ETL guy, or a mutant database guy, you have to know your stuff just to be considered “good”. This is or should be expected so that alone doesn’t necessarily make you great.
What crosses you over into “greatness”? This is just my opinion but I think it is being a generalist even if you are a specialist. When the sh!t hits the fan and all fingers are pointed at SQL, not only do you have to identify that it is or is not a SQL problem but you have to prove it. How do you prove it is not a SQL problem? You find where the packets are being dropped. You find the latency in the SAN. You find the bad .Net code. When you can do that, you get elevated to “Goto guy” status.
I am not going to pretend to be the goto guy. Maybe back on NT4Win2kVB6ASP but I have had the SQL goggles on for the past couple of years. I am planning on changing that this year but I am not sure how yet. Maybe OS. I would like to get really good at Windows Server 2008. However, being good C# in VS2008 would be a nice asset too. Hmm…
What do you think makes a good database professional a great one? What non-db skills would you like to add to your arsenal at the expert level?
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