This month’s invitation is from James Serra. He had a great idea for a topic, talking about the risks we have taken in our careers.

I really like this month’s topic. I’m a firm believer that you learn from your failures. Taking chances is how you end up with some of those failures. Personally, I’ve taken several Career risks. I’ve worked for over 10 different companies in my 20-year career. It means I’ve had a wide range of experiences and insights into how things work in different companies.  

One specific story I can think of.

I was working at a company for about 6 years. The company actually went through a merger, so I technically worked for 1 company for 3 years and then the merged company for 3 more years.  I had seen a lot of change and knew it was time to move on because of the changes going through the company. 

A former coworker and friend reached out to me about a great Architecture position. Working with a group to change the company’s technology and its direction. The company was pretty large and had been around for 10+ years. It appeared like a really good opportunity and something that was exciting to work on. When I got into the position, I realized we had an extremely large hill to climb. If you have ever tried to come in from the outside and change a large, slow-moving organization with a lot of long-standing technology, you know how hard this is.  

Just about 4 months into the new position, I was approached by another former coworker to join a startup. This had only about 100 employees, and while it was doing well financially, it was clear that working for such a small company would be a gamble. It was also a new technology that I had not worked with. I would have to learn new things and work with a very small group, and be concerned about how much money we had. I had joined a similar company years before and was laid off after about 3 years. This was a risky move, going from a large, well-known company with a good salary to a startup. Something that had impacted me in the past.  

The risk was well worth it since it was one of the best companies I’ve worked for. It was a great, fast-paced time that allowed me to learn many new things and work with a great group of people. My ultimate decision really did come down to the people that I was going to work with. Knowing the people and what they had done in the past gave me the confidence to take the risk. 

Taking risks is important in your life and your career as you move forward. You can help mitigate those risks by having a strong community, network, and mentors around you to support these decisions. 

I really hope I can see some of you at these events!  Please reach out to me if you would like to discuss any problems you are having or would like to discuss future events! 

March 12th, 2026, Red Gate Summit Chicago 2026.

March 14th 2026, Data Saturday, Chicago 

March 19th, 2026, Red Gate Summit, London 2026. 

March 24th, 2026, Nordic PGDAY 2026 

March 26th, 2026, PgDay Paris 

My new company, Redgate Software, has a Mental Health Week every year and also has a day dedicated to Mental Health. The goal of the day is to take a day off work, reset, and focus on something related to your mental health.  

I’ve never really had this at former companies, so I thought I would discuss it a little here on the Blog and get thoughts from others. I have taken plenty of days off for my mental health in the past, and I’ve suggested it to many of my employees, but it was an informal thing that I did on my own; none of the companies I worked for had a dedicated day/week for it.  

For many of us in this technical industry, we don’t really “shut off”. Meaning even if you give us days off, we still work. This is very true for me and most of my career, as I’ve been on call or managing teams and rarely am “shut off”. The few times this was true were when I’ve been out of cell range in the mountains. Even then, I would seek to find wifi after about a day to check in with the team.   

That brings me to my new role and the very different life I live. I’m not on call, I don’t manage anyone else, and I can be officially “shut off”. That is very scary to me.  

For anyone who has spent half their life doing something, you know it’s not easy to just change that something. It takes time to change habits, thoughts, and processes you have built over many years. 

I see myself as a Recovering DBA, someone who has spent the better part of their life in the Operational DBA role, but now that’s not my role anymore. 

I have a plan for my day off. Yes, I plan to get some work items done, but I also intend to take a long bike ride, do some cleaning around the office, and move things around. Something that makes my space feel more like it’s ready or my role vs the DBA role I had in the past.  

I very much appreciate that my new employer gives us a mental health day. I’m sure it’s going to take me a lot more of these days to truly reset. We do things one day at a time, though, and keep moving forward every chance we get.  

Would love to hear your thoughts on what you should do for a Mental Health day.  

What a great collection of stories all about aging!  I really appreciated everyone take time to reply to the question.  

I’m going to do this a little differently for my summary. I will list the blogs below and provide key summary points for each.  I also created a video summary. I intend to do more of this in the future. 

You choose how you would like to consume the content, and share with me how you would prefer to see it in the future!  I intend to do a lot more video/audio work in the future. 

You will have to find my perspective on this topic in the video link. 

Rob Farley

Key summary: Rob talks less about specific code and how it has aged, he reminds us how important it is to understand that databases live, breath and change over time.  The queries will need to be updated and reviewed in the future.  It doesn’t mean the original query was bad; it’s just not as new as it once was, and it’s important that we review these older queries to determine whether they are still performing well.  

Hugo Kornelis 

Key Summary: Hugo talked about code he started way back in 2013(not too long ago for some of us). He took what he could from the code, improved it, documented it, and sent it on its way.  Over the years, he had to continue providing support, but there were no real changes to the system beyond that.  That speaks to the dedication and hard work of putting time into a project to leave it better than you found it.  Investing time up front in your code and in the logic can pay off in the long run.  I’m happy I could take him for a trip down memory lane! 

Steve Jones 

Key Summary: Steve shows us some old string-manipulation code he wrote a long time ago. He makes it clear that some of the functions or code we have used in the past can still do the work today. Sometimes minor changes are needed, or perhaps a more efficient approach is possible, but for the most part, it still works well!  This reminds me of a Date script I keep around and will discuss in the video version of this summary. 

Chad Callihan 

Key Summary: Chad told a story about how a simple idea and solution he presented for an open opportunity are still useful.  It shows that even if it’s not your specific area, it’s a good idea to provide solutions, and they may last a very long time.  

Andy Brownsword

Key Summary: I really like what Andy said at the end of his post, “It’s not enough to make it work correctly. It needs to fail correctly too”.  I think this does a really good job of summarizing aging code.  If we plan and prepare for failures better, then we will handle aging that much better. 

Deb the DBA

Key Summary: Deb focused on how to keep your code from becoming legacy.  I enjoyed this take on the question, which provides guidelines on how to ensure that, as it ages, it does so well and remains useful moving forward. 

Todd Kleinhans

Key Summary: I’m pretty sure I’ve run into Todd at some event in the past. If not, I need to!  He shares many of the same philosophies as I do: “Keep Moving forward”! Focus on what you can do right now, use documentation, best practices, and good guidelines, and push forward with what you are doing.  Focusing on the past just enough to learn from it and then move on.  Love this perspective. 

I’m a little late getting this together, but that’s not entirely my fault.

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I wanted to once again talk about Aging!  But not in the human sense.  I mean in the code sense. It’s a simple question that can be interpreted in many ways, and I look forward to all the ways you might see this.   

The question is.  “How has your code aged?”   

Pick a project or code script and decide if it “aged well”.  Is it still in use?  Is it functioning?  Did it do what was needed, and now it’s no longer around?   Perhaps talk about how useful it was for the time, but now it would never be needed because of AI or other aspects.  

Knowing what we have done in the past and how we have improved is very important to moving forward.  It’s also a great time to be grateful for something you created in the past, and perhaps it is still working.  Very often in this fast-paced world, we spend all of our time looking at the new project and the next big thing, and we forget to enjoy the things that created the foundation for our future.  

I hope you will join this exercise by posting on February 10th, 2026.   Please make sure to link to this original post and include the T-SQL Logo on the post.  I’ll write up the summary after Tuesday, and we have all the posts listed.  

I attended a different event this weekend. It wasn’t specifically a technical event, and it wasn’t specifically NOT a technical event.   It was about something we are all facing in the future. 

Aging.  

That’s right, whether we like it or not,t we are all getting older.  For me personally, ly it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’ve always thought about and focused on the future. I believe in two major concepts in my life.  

Visit your Default Future. 

I’ve presented on this before. This idea comes from a book called Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success(Amazon Audible link).  I highly recommend this book; I typically re-read it every few years.  Default future means that you can meet/see someone who will be your future if you change nothing else right now.  Perhaps you are in the same roles as a family member, perhaps you do similar things to that family member. You can quickly see what you will become in 5-10 years by observing this person like you.  If you don’t like what you see in your future, you need to change it.  The book outlines steps to do so.  

Chapters. 

I see my life as a series of chapters. As we go through life, we experience big events and moments.  I don’t believe anyone has just one path that they stay on for the entirety of their life.  I believe it changes, and when you leave a path or change it, you open a new chapter.  I believe I am in Chapter 3 of my life right now, and I have no idea how many more chapters there will be.  

During the event, we heard from many participants of diverse ages and backgrounds. The items below are my key takeaways. 

1. Keep talking to each other! Making connections, having friends, and even just having discussions are statistically proven to prolong life.  I wrote about connections recently, and that post confirmed it even more.  
2. We have a serious problem with our Senior population right now.  Scammers are targeting them.  We need to help educate and support them in these times. Legislation is also a good idea to help address this problem.  I will personally volunteer for more events to get involved. 
3. 90% of Seniors are now connected to the internet and using applications, just like the rest of us.  But the tech industry is not building for this Demographic.  They are not developing applications for older adults.  We need to start considering this when designing applications and building solutions.  
4. AI can greatly help the aging population, but it is not designed for seniors to use. We can’t just provide the same tools everyone else has; we need to customize them and make this better. Several people at the event were working on solutions around this. 
5. Your identity should not be related to your work.  Many of us in this industry devote so much of our time and lives to our jobs that they become our identity.  I plan to write a blog post soon about how to separate these items.  Think about this now, though,h as it becomes a big part of your life moving forward. 
6. Some of the simplest things you can do to improve your life are to show Gratitude to yourself, others, and to play!  That’s right, enjoy some of life and make sure you have time for play.  

I have a lot more to share on these topics and events, but this is enough to get the discussion started. Please take a minute to start thinking of these things now.  Time is always moving, and it moves very quickly. 

Let’s do our best to LIVE with the time we have. 

This is very similar to my server in the story below.

TSQL Tuesday info.

TSQL Tuesday is a blogging event that happens on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. This week’s host is Louis Davidson (https://drsql.link/2026/01/13/t-sql-tuesday-194-invitation-learning-from-mistakes/)

You can find all the key rules and information on hosting if you would like to host at this link. https://tsqltuesday.com/

The Request. 

I haven’t participated in a #TSQL Tuesday in quite some time.  I saw this topic and said, “That’s perfect!”  I love talking about Failure and mistakes!  I have a whole presentation about it, and I’m hoping to make a series of blog posts about it very soon.   

You do not learn from success in life; you learn from failure.  I hope you are making lots of mistakes so that you can learn! 

“This month, I am asking you to share about a mistake you made that touches on data in some way. Whatever the mistake was, maybe when you were a complete newbie, maybe just last week.”

I have lots to choose from, but I have been very nostalgic as of late, so I’ll go to one of my very first mistakes as a DBA. 

Some of you won’t even be able to go back this far in technology, but some of you will appreciate this.  It was Mid 1999. I was just learning about Databases and had only recently inherited a Sybase SQL Anywhere DB.  I had no formal training in SQL and just a general understanding of what the Database was and what it did.  I was a customer support manager and needed to figure out this new DB that we were using.  It quickly became evident that I preferred working on the DB items to the manager items.  My passion at the time was the technical side of things.  

It started with a simple request: The DB had a front-end called HEAT (later Goldmine CRM).  This system allowed the creation of simple forms and the entry of data about support tickets and customers.  We needed a backend process that would update the phone number whenever another field was updated.  I had just read something about Triggers… yeah, some of you know where this is going.  

So I wrote up a Trigger that updates the phone number field whenever another field is updated.  Pretty simple…..Unfortunately, the trigger updated every phone number in the table every time an agent updated a field in the system. I didn’t understand that each update was row-level, but the query was acting on the whole table, and I didn’t specify that it should only update the record that was changed.  As people started using the system, it would wait about a minute each time to update all the other records. Luckily, the data was still correct since it was just updating the same row, but it was using all the system resources.  Since this was the late 90’s, we didn’t have high-powered servers. The DB didn’t stand a chance of staying up and running correctly.  It took most of the afternoon for us to bring the server down, start it back up, and remove the trigger.  We weren’t sure what the issue was at first, but then I remembered the change I made. 

Luckily, it was a small company, and they were pretty used to the system going down throughout the day.  Uptime wasn’t as big a thing back then as it is now.  I learned some great lessons on this day, and they have continued to shape me as a DBA.   

Lessons Learned 

1. Test everything!  I did not have a testing environment for this system. 
2. Respect all Triggers. I’ve seen tons of triggers since this first issue, and I’ve questioned every one of them to understand whether they are fully needed and how they are used.  They are very powerful and very dangerous. 
3. Enjoy the early days and the small companies. Suppose you find yourself in a DBA position in a small company and are just learning new things.  Enjoy that time! Use that time to really learn about some of these things that can go wrong.  I learned a ton of important lessons at this company. 
4. Ask questions and seek out others. I was the lone DBA at the time and had no one else to bounce ideas off.  I didn’t find community till years later, and I’m sure it would have helped if I had a community back then.  

This wasn’t entirely intentional.  It was just a problem I didn’t know how to articulate. I still don’t have a firm answer, but it’s something I want to talk about more and more.    

Most people would say that I have a lot of Connections, a large network.  I’ve even had my kids tell me, “Dad, you know everyone”.   While many people know me in the community, or know of me. I don’t really feel like I’m connected to them.  One of my favorite Authors and speakers, Simon Sinek, has recently started talking about this much more. Here is a quick video describing some of the ideas. 

I want to make something very clear: I’m not advocating for moving back to more in-office work.  I just started a fully remote position! What I am advocating for is connections.  Human connections that mean something to you. Now more than ever, we can go through a full day without any actual human intervention. We can pretty much do everything sitting behind our phones or computers and never really talk to people.  Even if we do talk to a friend, it might just be in a chat channel or something else.  This is concerning.  

I can’t change the whole world;

I can only change myself.  

I can change the events I manage and attend. 

I can influence the people I meet.  

My goal is to make real connections. 

We have seen a decline in convention attendance over the last year; people are questioning the value of conferences and events, given that they can do everything through AI or learn online.  Personally, the value of an event to me has never been the learning. It’s always been the connections I’ve made.  I know that I can learn without an event/conference.   I cannot easily make connections outside my company without an event/conference.  

This is my initiative for the year.  My next post will be all about how to make this happen for you with tips and tricks.  If you are interested in helping with this initiative, please reach out, and I’ll suggest ways we can work together. 

Human connection should be one of the most important things in our lives.  

Below are some key accomplishments from last year:

• I spoke internationally.
  
  • I was able to speak at PG Conf India in Hyderabad. It was a great experience, and I plan to do it again soon. It was even better since many of my team members were able to attend.
  • Personal fitness.
    
    • Failed my first 50-mile Gravel ride. (Moab Gravel Fondo)
    • Succeeded at my first 50-mile Gravel ride. (Rebecca’s Private Idaho)
    • Total of 5k miles on bike for the year.
  • Travelled a LOT.
    
    • New Countries indeed: Canada, Singapore, Japan (Tokyo).
    • New States: Hawaii, Virginia.
    • Several International trips, multiple regional trips, and vacations with family.
  • Led a team of DBAs and DBEs
    Very proud of how well the team works independently. Enabled the team to react quickly to any situation. More proactive changes were implemented to improve system stability.
  • Upgrade of PG towards the end of the year.
  • Started a new job
    Very excited about starting a new job right at the end of the year. Going to be the most challenging position for me yet!

  Some key goals I have for the next quarter:

  • Write every day. Post a blog once a week.
    This is critical to my new position and something I’ve wanted to do in the past, but haven’t had the time to focus on.
  • Set up the Testing environment.
    I typically have a production/Test/Dev environment to play with that includes lots of real-world data. When I want to test something new in PG or some other database. I now need to create something that does this. I have plenty of scripts and data to use for this; I just need to get it set up. This project is in process, and you will probably hear more about it soon.
  • Plan dates for three events in Utah.
    I have an SQL Saturday, a Kids Code Camp, and a Big Mountain Data event to plan. Need to lock in dates.
  • Figure out how to work differently.
    As mentioned in a previous blog post, I am transitioning into a very different role and need to focus my attention on a very different way of seeing the world.
  • Prepare my new presentations.
    I have several new presentations I’m working on and will be prepping all the content for them in the next few weeks.
  • Restart the user groups here in Utah.
    We have some user groups that need to resume operations, and I will be focusing on those events with other members of the community.
  • Manage Sponsorships.
    I have 3 events this year that I’m managing sponsorships for, and I need to make sure they are all ready to go.

  This is not everything I have planned for the quarter, but it’s a good start to keep things moving along. Hopefully, I can post an update in a few months and let you all know how these things are going.

  Hope to see you all at a future event in 2026!

  Here are some photos that I hold dear from my 2025 Adventures.

  

  Presenting in India!

  

  My Daily Driver. Most of my commuting to work.

  

  Just ride!

  

  Solemn moment at Arlington National Cemetery

  

  The Jewel in Singapore is well worth a visit. Amazing place! I would love to go back.

  

  Tokyo was a fantastic city.

  ]]> https://sqlasylum.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/wrapping-up-2025-and-looking-forward/feed/ 5 787 asylumphoto https://sqlasylum.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/changing-jobs/ https://sqlasylum.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/changing-jobs/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000 http://sqlasylum.wordpress.com/?p=778 Continue reading Changing Jobs]]> If you haven’t seen my LinkedIn post regarding my new job, you should check that out first. 

  I started this week at Redgate Software as an Advocate. This isn’t just a new job for me, it’s a complete change in my day-to-day work. I’ve spent the last 20 years working in the DBA world. It’s a complete change to come to a position where my first few days were not spent discovering which Databases the company has and where they were located, not trying to figure out whether Backups were being done on the systems or what performance problems they had. 

  It’s a BIG change for me.  The idea of not being on call, dealing with incidents, or simply being a member of the Engineering department is a foreign concept to me.  

  The good news is that it’s VERY exciting!  Change is a tricky thing, but one that we need to embrace.  

  I’m a firm believer that to find happiness, you need to find challenge and change.  

  It also helps that my biggest passion has always been the community and helping others.  

  I’m pretty sure these are going to change.  But I like to set something I can measure at different points along the journey. I don’t have a problem failing at my goals as long as I learn something.  I intend to review these each quarter. So while they are listed as 2026 goals, I’m sure they will change as I move forward through the year. 

  2026 Goals

  • PG SLC UserGroup needs to be restarted and running. Hold at least five meetings. 
  • SLC SQL Server UseGroup, Same as above, with at least five meetings. 
  • Host an AI event. 
  • 3 Events in Utah for Utah Geek Events this year. 
  • Speaking at 5 PG conferences this year. Hopefully more. 
  • Assist three conferences in the US to get started. Hopefully, using the new https://dayofdata.org/
  • Speaking at 10+ User group meetings, Virtual or in person. 
  • Create five new presentations.  Three are already in progress. 
  • Have fun

  These goals are mine and don’t necessarily reflect the specific goals I will have with my employer. I think many of them will align, and I’m sure a lot of these items will overlap.  I also think I’m being a little conservative on the numbers here.

  What can you expect next?  This blog will be changing. It will still have content on PG, SQL Server, and biking, but I intend to revamp its look and make it easier to find things.  I will also be posting at least weekly, so check back often and subscribe! 

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