Category — The Place for Everything Else

I have spent the last few weeks thinking about what the new year and the new decade will bring.  I am happy to leave 2009, which was a strange year, at least I felt strange about it.  Not much was accomplished in my civilian career because I spent much of the year deployed to Kosovo with the National Guard.  It was an interesting experience, but it put me behind in building new skills for my civilian career.  So….2010 is the year to jump start my career.  Fortunately, I do have a good job, one that will provide excellent experience for me in the coming year.

So other then doing my day to day work at my job, what I am going to do to jump start and beef up my SQL Server skill set? I will focus on the following 3 items:

1. Increase my blogging.  My goal this year is to post at least once per week, 52 times this next year.  Writing about a subject is a good learning experience, at least for me.
2. Take and pass the two exams for SQL Server 2008 development,  70-433 & 70-451.
3. Attend at least 4 in-person events relating to SQL Server.  This could be a code camp, PASS, local user group, or some classroom training.  It just has to be in person and related to SQL Server in some way.

So, here’s to a great new year!

We’ve all seen them, the poorly (or barely!!) normalized database. Every time you dig into the thing you just groan with pain. You go into it to fix one thing and you find half-dozen other things you want to fix as well. But how much work should you put into the thing?

Earlier in my career I would spend all sorts of time just fixing away. It’s so much fun to tweak some code and see it run 2, 3, 4 or more times faster then before. But do you really need to fix it? From a business point of view, can you justify the time? If you made that piece of code run 5 times faster, would anybody notice or care? And would all your hard work have a positive impact on the bottom line of your employer?

Just because you can fix something, doesn’t mean you should spend the time. There are plenty of databases that suffer from poor design, bad coding practice, lack of useable indexes, etc. but still manage to do an OK (but not great) job. Maybe they do not support many users, or they are a bit slow, but nobody complains too much about it. Maybe they support a declining part of the business. Maybe you would be providing more value to the business doing something else.

Just my 2 cents worth!