What is Professional Development?

I am writing this post because the SQL PASS Professional Development(PD) Virtual Chapter is going to be launching soon. I wanted to define what this means to me, not PASS, and put out a desperate cry call for help. Arnie Rowland and Mark Caldwell are my partners in crime with supporting roles from Blythe Morrow and Thomas LaRock. The virtual chapter is launching at the Summit. More to come on this. This is what we are in need of.

• Short article\post authors on Professional Development topics as they relate to the SQL Server Professional
• SQL Bloggers who would like their existing professional development content syndicated to the PD feed like general topic on SQLServerpedia.
• Volunteers for monthly live meetings
• Help us spread the word through your networks and blogs
• Your ideas on how the Professional Dev PASS virtual chapter can serve the community.

This chapter can only be as good as its members and by helping the chapter grow, you are really helping yourself grow.

So what do I think consists of professional development? Well, you could start of with this tag but that might give you the wrong impression. Let’s see what the Internet says:

From Wikipedia:

Professional development refers to skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement. Professional development encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities, ranging from college degrees to formal coursework, conferences and informal learning opportunities situated in practice. It has been described as intensive and collaborative, ideally incorporating an evaluative stage ^[1] There are a variety of approaches to professional development, including consultation, coaching, communities of practice, lesson study, mentoring, reflective supervision and technical assistance.^[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_development

That is pretty close to what I was thinking especially skills\knowledge obtained for personal development and career advancement. Here are some PD topics IMO:

• Social networking\Blogging
• Handing tough situations\office politics\obnoxious coworkers in the work place
• Negotiating offers and raises
• Career path decision trees
• Job seeking skills
• Presentation delivery techniques
• Management(Time, People, Project etc.)
• Development of organizational skills
• Volunteering in the SQL Server community

And the list could go on for a long time. Hit Arnie, Mark or myself up if this is something you would like to help out with.

What do you think should be covered in a Professional Development virtual chapter?

Professional Development: Internet Image

Writing from the plane. I just wanted to let you know this because it sounds like I am cool. On the way to Sacramento with a short stop in Vegas. Hopefully, I do not miss my plane and end up in a poker tournament for more $ than I can afford against people I have to get lucky to beat. *wink* Nah.. That is the first of many jokes that are not funny in this post. It is Grandpop’s funeral that I am headed to so I can’t miss my flight and if I do, I have to go on stand by. Before you bring all the sappy condolences etc, I am not down. He lived a LONG, prosperous, and happy life. He was a violin professor a university in Serbia before WWII. He escaped from a concentration camp in WWII. He came to America and gave up the violin to provide for his family which grew to three daughters, five grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. Oh yah, he outlived two wives and was steady pimpin’ into his 80’s.

Relevance, please?

So, you ask, what does all that have to do with Professional Development? I just advertised some things about the kind of person I am. It is now part of my Internet Image. That first paragraph is like a tattoo. It will never go away. This is what some say should be avoided when speaking of internet image in the SQL Server(and beyond) community. They say maintain the most upmost professionalism at all times. That is one strategy and I agree it is hard to get into trouble being conservative. However, you can also be yourself if assume the following:

• (Today’s + affirmation) By acting myself, I can interact with people with the same interests as me, I am likable for who I am, and I want to associate with people like me even in a professional environment.
• I would prefer to work in an environment where I fit the general culture.
• By fitting in with the culture, I am a foot a head of an equal job candidate for same position that does not fit in the with culture.

Talking about myself again!

To use me as an example, I display my xbox gamer tag proudly on this site. I would not want to work for a company where most of the people do not own Xboxes. At the same time, I would love to work at a company where there are games in the break room.

Of course, you can cross the line and use poop or toilet analogies. At the same time, wouldn’t you prefer to work for a boss who appreciated crude internets geek humor if that is what you are into? Same goes for bowling, knitting, d&d, and wiccan magic. He77, if it was not for HR, my first question to potential job candidates would be “What is Goatse?”. I kid but as a hiring manager, I do look for technical ability first but cultural fit is a not too far behind. Look at it like this. I do not care if I walk by and one of my DBAs is reading the Onion because I know when a server explodes and the ʪĦÍŦ hits the fan, they will be there be it for three hours or thirty; what ever it takes to recover, boot, or function. That intangible quality is a job skill!

Where is the line?

I suggest that anytime you ever post anything online, you follow this decision tree.

• Picture your dream job that you want to be in DBA century(10 human years)  from now.
• Ask yourself if this will help or hurt your chances for that job?
• If the answer is yes, then ask yourself if you would be happy working for such a company\manager?
• If both answers are yes, then do not post!
• If either are no, post away.
• If drinking tasty cold alcoholic beverages, immediately post something “insightful” on your boss’s boss’s facebook wall.

So can this backfire?

There are also other circumstances that I should warn you against being yourself like if you are the only one who laughs at your jokes or is boring, obnoxious, always right, a trekkie, or a LOTR fanatic(7 hours of walking! Even the trees!).  These mostly hold true for the unforeseeable future too so if you are not confident in your future, you may want to exercise caution as well and remember that life happens. Here are some things that would make me be more conservative.

• Your job market is small. Examples include a small town or a very small niche specialty like a Sybase to SQL Server conversion specialist in Bee-eF-eeVille, Texas.
• Your experience lends to junior level jobs for now. We all started off some where. Until your technical experience outpaces any possible negative perceptions, then a conservative route made be prudent. As I said earlier, it is hard to get in trouble being conservative so when in doubt, lean tight right like a southern Baptist GOP senator in the closet.
• Religion and politics(previous bullet aside) – This is more of my personal preference because a valid argument could be made for putting this out there. I, on the other hand, think that my dream job could be working for someone that I don’t agree with on Religion\Politics and I think the hiring manager may choose an equal but “image conservative” candidate over me because of it. However, if this is your cup of tea, +10 street cred homeboy!
• You are conservative by nature. I am only making a case for being who you are. Do not portray anything you are not.
• You think you may change careers over the next 10 years. Again, life happens. Lean conservatively unless you are confident in your future.

What am I trying to say...

I have not spoken much about the benefits of this openness on “The CPU” as my wife calls it. Let me wrap this up with that. Basically, it is more fun and more natural to be ourselves. I believe you are more interesting. Why hold back personality for dry dull dialog? That said, being anything but being the utmost professional on the internet should be done after careful thought so don’t log into alt.binaries.erotica.asian.furry.midgets.multimedia with your real name! Besides, I have worked for the same company for the last 10 years and I do not think I will be looking over the next 5-10+ years so take this with a grain of salt. Lastly, the golden rule is don’t do anything you would not be proud to show yo mamma.

Speaking of…. Yo mamma so nasty we tried to flush her dirty pages with DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS  but it kept failing because of the stench from that puss bubble excreting from her VLF. BOOM.

Can you be too Thorough?

Can you take thoroughness to a fault? There are some things that cannot be taken too far like intelligence. In a business setting, have you ever met someone who was just too smart(competitors do not count)? How about too honest? Too skilled? Too good with customers? I do not think thoroughness fails into this category though my opinion has recently changed. I used to think that, as a DBA, I could not be through enough. In some scenarios this is true like backups and recovery testing. There are other areas where it just does not pay. For example, performance tuning. That last 10% might not be worth the 6 months that goes into it.

Let’s look at an extreme example of cycling the errorlog nightly. This could be as simple as setting the retention policy to greater than the default of 6 and configuring a job to run sp_cycle_errorlog. However, let’s get thorough.

1. Lets write our own proc to  do this. It calls sp_cycle_errorlog but we want to add our own logic.
2. Lets start off by writing to the windows application log: “Beginning Errorlog Cycling Process.”
3. Lets dump the errorlog to a table in msdb in case we ever want to query it.
   1. Dump xp_read_errorlog to #table and do a binary_checksum() with the new rows in the errorlog table so we are sure that SQL Server inserted them correctly.
   2. Errorlog table cleanup process
   3. SSIS package to push errorlog entries of the past 24 hours to a centralized enterprise-wide errorlog repository.
      1. Checksum across linked server
      2. Extract to text file increase we ever want to view it like a real errorlog file.
         1. Create a file name creation function that created a “unique” name and a table that maps the “unique” name with something that a human can understand.
4. Prechecks for sp_cycle_errorlog
   • Check disk space
   • Run checkdisk
   • Verify the previously cycled errorlog has a date of getdate()-1
     • If the previous errorlog is less than 24 hours old, check to see how long SQL has been up.
     • If the previous errorlog is older than 24 hours, halt processing. Page the DBA team with a critical alert because this should never happen EXCEPT once a year during the time change.
   • Run a custom process that steps through the previous steps to verify the completed successful.
1. Run sp_cycle_errorlog
   • Set the step to retry 10 times.
   • Log the Output to a text file.
   • Write a custom windows email service to send the results of the job step to the DBA team encrypted with PGP.
2. Post sp_cycle_errorlog steps
   • Zip errorlog
   • verify the archive with the compression software
   • Run a CRC on the zipped file
   • Copy the archive to the file server along with a text file containing the CRC.
     • Run a CRC on the file server and compare with CRC in the text file
3. Write “Cycle Errorlog Process Complete” to the windows application log.
4. Email the entire DBA that this process was successful.
5. Move copies to the cloud at Amazon’s S3, Windows Live Drive, Drop.io.
6. Pass the entire content of the errorlog to twitter CHAR(140) as a time for the internet can crowdsource your errors.

Again, extreme example but that is being overly thorough to put it mildly. Where is the balance? I think I have come to realize that a trait of a great DBA is balancing thoroughness with discretion. Some tasks\process\queries need the utmost level of thoroughness yet some just need to work. Sometimes, you have something that needs to be thorough but it is more important for the query\task\process to be in place yesterday. In that case, you have to sacrifice thoroughness for speed.

I am glad I was able to step back and learn from the real world example that got me thinking about this.

What personality traits do you think tend to be common among the top 10% DBAs or geeks in general?

The Problem Statement

Imagine walking into your bathroom to foulest, funkiest, horrendous smell. I mean the air is green. It looks like something died in the toilet…. a week ago! You get straight to work with the air freshener, comet and toilet scrubber. After scrubbing, you flush and the funk overflows everywhere? What the..? We were solving for the wrong problem. If we could have correctly identified the problem as a clogged toilet, we could have done what we needed to solve the real problem.

This principle is just as important when troubleshooting problems in the database world. Fixing the wrong problem can also cause the funk to explode.  You may think that getting the problem statement is an obvious and trivial task. Sometimes it is staring you in the face. Sometimes, it is harder. Here are some scenarios that make it difficult.

Troubleshooting Derailment Factors

Being told what the problem is – Imagine a dev or business analyst telling you there is a data problem. They say there are duplicates rows. However, it is really their query. Business rules allows for dups. If you don’t identify the query as the problem, you could burn time or worse, “clean up” the dups.

Identifying a symptom as the problem – Let’s say that your cluster keeps failing over periodically. You do some troubleshooting and find out it is because of SQL agent. You think it an easy fix and you set it to not affect the group. However, now the agent fails and stays down all night. The business critical ETL did not run. Come to find out that the real problem was a flapping disk that the agent log file was on.

Being under the gun – When the database is down, sometimes it can be hard to step back and identify the problem when all you are focused on is getting it up. This can be dangerous. What if you have database come up suspect? While hastily trying “things” to get the server up, you try to detach\attach it. Now what?

The Power of the Problem Statement
By identifying the right problem, you can focus in on the possible solutions and use your knowledge and resources to pick and implement the best solution as fast as possible. This can save us from go down tangents, fixing stuff that does not need to be fixed or making a bad situation worse.

DBA Compliments

“Wow, the application sure is smoking today.”

“You know, Bob, I cannot remember the last time SQL was down. You sure are doing a good  job.”

“Gee, is the log always that big or are you happy to see me?”

Ha, every production DBA knows those compliments NEVER happen. We have a thankless job. No one ever notices until the database is down. Think I am kidding? When was the last time you told your Exchange buddy how solid the mail server has been?

Well, I am talking about a different compliment. Actually, Colin Stasiuk (Twitter) is talking. Complimenting skills is of which he speaks. I just thought this topic deserved more than a comment.

Colin writes:

I’ve always ranked myself from a discipline point of view as:

1. Database Administration
2. Database Development
3. Business Intelligence

Now I’m trying to decide if I should “bone up” on the business intelligence side of SQL Server to try and get that around where my database development skills are at or whether I should branch off and do something different altogether.

The short answer is YES and it is not meant to answer Colin. I just think this is a great topic. It really doesn’t matter how you grow as a professional(and person in general IMO) as long as you grow. Aww, *hugs4all luvu2* It would be helpful if you choose something that adds to your professional capital but, hey, taking up Feng shui may provide the stress relief that you need to take it to the next level.

Staying on topic marginally, we will focus on the most relevant side technologies to a DBA and related database professionals.

Colin mentions the three pillars of a database professional:

Database Administration

Database Development

Business Intelligence

 

I submit to you you must be proficient in two of those to be in the top 25% of the market. A DBA better be sufficient in tsql if they need to write admin scripts or troubleshooting OLTP code and performance. A BI professional needs to know database development for loading data and writing reports. A Database Developer definitely benefits professionally by knowing either of the other two pillars.

I would specialize in one at the 500 level and get to know a 2nd one at the 400 level. Think of the side skill as your “minor” in college. There are not many who can focus long enough to master all three and gain real world experience. So you have two pillars that you are fully functional in, now what?

Here is a far inclusive list of desired talents in Database Professionals:

• SAN administration
• .Net development
• Powershell administration
• Project management
• Windows\Active directory administration
• Biztalk
• Message queuing apps like MSMQ
• Hardware experience
• IIS administration
• Other RDBMS
• MSFT or Vendor X App\Middleware servers
• Technical writing
• Automated load testing
• Presales consulting skills
• Virtualization experience
• etc

The list is really endless. You could even find small shops that would love their DBA to also know exchange so they get 2 for 1. If you can think of it, there is or will be an employer looking it. “Nude midget” returns a job posting on Monster. I kid you not.

So what do you “minor” in? You probably choose out of necessity first. The success of your project requires a project manager or some small .net code refactoring. You either suck it up or the project fails. That is why they have a DBA who has to manage the project instead of a PM who learns database administration on the fly. If you have the luxury of choosing, I would pick the skill that balances what interests you and what adds to your brand the most. This makes learning easy while helping you professionally.

Now you know what you are going to work on. What is next? I would try to tie the learning with experience. If you are learning out of necessity, that is a non-issue.  If you are trying to pick up a new skill in between consulting gigs, you may consider other options. If you are working on project management, volunteer. A lot of charities post their IT projects on craig’s list and you may be able to help while learning. They may post looking for a Dev but hit them up and see if the need a PM, tech writer, OS admin etc. If you are going with .Net development, you can join and contribute to an open source project like on codeplex or DotNetNuke. Use your imagination. For every one paying gig, there are hundred of opportunities to gain experience while learning. You see, a project manager suddenly becomes an option when the price is free.

Once again, complimenting your DBA skills is a definite YES. Complimenting your DBA is optional but don’t blame SQL Server when your resources automagically get governed.

Call for Speakers and Abstract Tips

I have now been on both ends of the process. Submitting abstracts for conferences and selecting them in this year’s SQL PASS process.

First, I would like to applaud PASS for taking a huge step forward in two areas. First is marketing. They have grow the submissions,  sessions and attendees at an exponential pace. I guess they will beat TECHED this year. They also introduced a social element to the process. Once you submitted an abstract, it was open to others to view. This creates a crowdsourcing element. It makes the community to step it up a notch. The result is a better conference for the participants due to competition.

Here are a few tips from my experience on both sides of the isle.

• Get a proof reader. Word can spell check but it does not pick up on everything especially punctuation and grammar errors. I suck at this too. If you read a blog post from me with no grammar errors, it probably means the wife proofed it. I saw this a lot with foreign submissions. Some of these sessions, I am sure the speaker would do a good job but I have to take points because of this.
• Use vivid action verbs. Do not use have, be , was, were etc. However, go beyond action verbs like “learn” and tell us what attendees will “consume”, "be inundated with”, “be bombarded  with” etc.
• Use as many characters as possible. There were a few short abstracts that I found short but good. However, at first glance, I was hesitant until I realized the abstract was very, very concise. In general, it is better to use more words than necessary than too few. If you have the gift of conciseness, good for you. Otherwise, use words!
• Submit as many abstracts as possible. This should be a “duh” bullet but I see MVP’s and authors submitting a single abstract on topics with lots of competitions like virtualization, SAN, and performance. Max out your submissions. Some conferences will not select you unless you are selected for at least 3 sessions.
• Start out and end with a BANG! This includes the session title, the first sentence and the last sentence. If your abstract is two sentences, keep working.
• Especially if you are new, look for topics that are not covered every conference several times like performance, consolidation, SANs etc. However…
• Do not submit niche topics. A heath care or financial industry related topic might be compelling but spin it as a compliance topic that could be applied to a lot of industries.

Anyway, I would be happy to review your abstract in the future and provide constructive criticism. Feel free to drop me a note.

Things you Know Now…

There is a new meme started by Mike Walsh (Twitter, blog). He tagged Brent Ozar(RSS, Twitter) who tagged me amongst other.

Here is the the basis of the meme to quote Mike.

When I wrote about empirical evidence and learning through trying (instead of asking only), I got thinking about things I wish I knew when I was a Junior DBA that I know now.

So here is what I know now that I wish I knew then(and usually learned the hard way).

Microsoft Project is your friend.

I have written about this before but it is worth it to revisit. I started out making big production changes to mission critical systems with nothing but a task list in my head. I evolved to notepad and then excel. My success % improved with each jump. Now, I can floor my boss and customers with downtime estimates accurate the minute. On top of that, I can establish doable timelines and get more resources if my time line does meet expectations.

You can be your worst enemy.

Ego can make a brilliant employee a liability. It manifests is several ways( at least for me).

• Jump on the new groups sporting all your brand new certs in your sig trying to “help”. However based on attitude, it is clear you are there for the wrong reasons usually attention.
• Bogarting knowledge. So you know something someone else does not, teach them instead of holding it over them. Help out he jr guy. He may be your boss someday.
• Ego can keep you from asking for help when you are clearly in over your head. I still struggle with this one.

Life is so much better when you are modest rather than smug.

If the hole is round, a square peg may not be the best fit.

I have officially become platform agnostic. SQL Server will always be my first love and what I am best at but there are other products out there. Not that I know everything there is about SQL but I don’t learn 10 new things about it everyday like I used to. As a n00b, I learn 30 new things a day about MySQLOracle. There are valid reasons to go MySQL or Oracle over SQL Server. That is just the way it is. Imagine rewriting the DAL layer for Wiki or Wordpress just because you had to run it on SQL Server. If you drink that much koolaid, more power to you. I think knowing the features and limitations of other platforms helps me as a SQL Server DBA as well.

The GUI is not your friend.

I used to be an enterprise manager DBA. When I learned how to admin from TSQL, that is were the Senior DBA level skills came in. I still use the GUI if it a click or two vs. several lines of code but I know how to write it and, if need be, automate it. If you can’t, learn.

Know X as good or better than the subject matter experts

Where X is technology that interacts with the database: The OS, hardware, SAN, network, and application code. Of course, this is not always feasible. I have never jumped on a switch to prove it is not a SQL Server problem but I have gotten pretty close. Once when all fingers pointed at SQL Server, I had them check the switch for errors and sure enough the firewall was set 100/half duplex. If nothing else, learn the hardware and OS inside and out.

Next Victims

Jonathan Kehayias(RSS, Twitter)

Jason Strate(RSS, Twitter)

Rob Boek(RSS, Twitter)

The New Definitive SQL Twitter List

I compiled a pretty big list of SQL people on twitter. Mainly out of loneliness It seemed like there were quite a few more Dev’s. Mac fanboys and unix people than SQL people. I tried to give people a head start so they could have a good experience before the interest waned.

Here is the list. Sheesh, it got 7500 page views.

I just added the 3 last new people to that list.

It is was a large undertaking and now I do not have to do it anymore

There is a better resource.

http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/twitter

If you are not on the list, add yourself and follow everyone on it.

P.S. Don’t forget to follow me: http://twitter.com/statisticsio

My O Face

Oracle. So I spend a good chunk of my weekend installing Oracle 10G on RHEL5 for several reasons.

• In my new job role, I get to manage Oracle DBA’s and have the opportunity to get as hands on with it as I want. At a minimum, I need to know enough talk with my team and customers but I want to get deeper.
• Diversity is good. Learning Oracle diversifies my portfolio. 
• I like to learn new stuff. MySQL is next.
• Microsoft is killing the DBA.

Jimmy May(Twitter, RSS) responded to my linux n00b installation woes with this tweet:

aspiringgeek @statisticsio However, I *heart* SQL Server. I don’t get how Oracle can thrive, except as matter of infrastructure or bigotry Mon, Dec 08 12:49:54 from web

 

I wanted to respond in greater depth than char(140). I used to think the same way. With the pricing and ease of use alone, I totally thought that SQL Server tastes better than Oracle. So why is Oracle still the leader in a lot of metrics? After a little thought, I have 3 theories.

Disclaimer: No numbers to back this up. Just observations so take it with a grain of salt.

Oracle bought upstream

Oracle has snatched up tons of ISV’s. Big ones like Peoplesoft, Siebel, and many others. These are in addition to their stout Oracle Apps offerings. Some can still run on MSSQL but the sales people and consultants are going to be pushing Oracle.

Hardware vendors may push Oracle more than SQL Server

Huh? Think about it a second. Why wouldn’t they push Oracle on AIX(if DB2 loses out), HPUX, or Solaris over MSSQLWindows? OEM’s probably make a little through Microsoft licensing but a lot of companies buy servers without Windows because get it through their enterprise agreement or other arrangement.

Microsoft is still catching up

There I said it and I can’t take it back. My experience is SQL Server became enterprise ready in SQL Server 2005. Of course, a lot of enterprises ran SQL 6.57.02000 and still do. However, the engine came of age in SQL Server 2005(especially sp2 ) and they greatly extended it in SQL Server 2008(especially Enterprise Edition ) However, a lot of the new features in SQL Server 2008 like spatial data, file stream, compression and data collectors were already in Oracle. Of course, Oracle charges extra for spatial and grid control.

I’m just sayin’

I think SQL Server has removed most of the technical reasons for going with Oracle at substantial discount. Assuming that is the case and that can and probably will be argued, what are the other roadblocks to adoption that I am missing?

Note: To my oracle homeboys, I am now database agnostic. I am not saying MSSQL should be taking over the world but from the CTO’s perspective, it seems like the obvious choice from the pricefeature perspective. After a couple more versions, MySQL may be in the same spot.

The Death of the DBA Part 2

 Awhile back I wrote about the Death of the DBA. After digesting, the Windows Azure PDC announcements it clear that the only thing SQL about SQL data services is the backend managed by Microsoft. In all reality, it is simply an ORM for the cloud(ORM WIKI). Call a spade a spade. A lot of us have had to support databases for ORM based applications. Most of us didn’t like it but at least we had a database to manage. Our cries for real SQL development fell mostly when deaf ears when managers could forgo a SQL developer head count while shipping faster and app devs could stay in the object realm.

From the manager’s perspective

Assuming that Microsoft delivers a high quality, full featured product with the Azure platform, there are a lot of compelling reasons for an IT decision maker to use this platform. No CapEX. No sysadmins. No SQL Dev’sDBA’s. No patch or backup management. On demand scaling. The early adopters will be startups that where the CEO is also the developer but as some of the companies succeed more established companies will follow.

The false downsides

Security is the big one. This will be solved. In the 90’s, everybody had a server closet or data center. IT folks didn’t want to give it up due to physical security. Today, colo and hosting has become the norm except for the largest environments. It is because a colodata center companieshosting providers can provide higher uptime, faster connectivity, greater redundancy for a much lower cost. Nowadays, some companies outsource everything IT from help desk to Exchange admin to the CTO. A good chunk of HP’s growth this quarter was from the division that was previously EDS. The cloud just takes it a step further.

Functionality is coming. This first release might be “SQL 6.5” like but you can bet that MSFT will listen and respond to customer needs. They have gotten much more agile at this. They are throwing a lot of resources at the cloud to make this happen.

3rd party ISV’s will respond. You may manage a SQL system that powers SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft etc. These company will have to respond to the market. They will release azure versions or their own web based hosted solution. If they don’t, they may get left behind by competitors. Look at how well SalesForce.com is doing.

The real downsides

You have to rewrite your app. I am not a .Net developer so I am not sure how big of deal it would be to port an existing app. I am not sure if many do as new as this stuff is but there will be at least some work effort. If I had to guess, it is considerable.

The biggest downside is the fact that this will be the only game in town for your app once it is written. If you are not happy with the service or prices are raised, you are stuck. How many of you have been unhappy with your web host and moved your web site? *Raises hand* You can’t do that once you are on Azure without a rewrite.

So what does this mean?

I really do not see a career path for a DBA or even a SQL developer to evolve into a role in an Azure based environment unless you want to become a .Net developer. It is pretty cut and dry as far as I see it. However, I do not think that Azure is going to take over the world and be the end of shipping SQL Server on a DVD. There will be SQL 2000 boxes out there 10 years from now because they work and there is no business need to upgrade. Features will exist in on premise SQL Server installations that just can’t happen in the cloud. Big news at PDC was blob support for in SDS. Hello and welcome to Access 97.

There will be hybrid solutions where part of the app is in the cloud while the VLDB is on premise. For example, the product catalog, TodaysOrders and CustomerLogin entities are in the cloud while the Orders, OrdersHistory and Customer databases are local.

Here is Microsoft’s vision:

 

SQL jobs

If everything works out for Microsoft, there will be less SQL and sysadmin jobs. The question is when and how many? I suspect Azure will RTM with Visual Studio 2010. That should be in about 2011 How quickly are enterprises going to jump on that? The first apps to go will be the ones where the developersysadmin is also “the DBA”. That won’t effect us and I would venture to guess that would be the typical azure installation for a few years. Providing Azure is a solid platform and given the development cycle, the enterprise may begin to move around 2015. I would say we are good until 2025 just with “legacy SQL” in the worst case scenario.  If there are 25% less DBA jobs by 2020, how bad is that going to hurt? I don’t know about you. Hiring and keeping a top notch SR. SQL person is really tough in my part of the country.

The crystal ball

Keep in mind that this is an editorial with a sprinkling of known facts and lots of forward looking guesses. I think SQL Server professional career path is safe for at least the next 10 years. If it is not, the writing will be on the wall in bold ms sans serif with plenty of time to evolve.

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  • Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

• My Cloud

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