I’ve touched on perspective a while back when I talked about Who’s an expert but I recently had a rather sharp lesson on it. If you read my recent post What goes around comes around you’ll know that I got to spend some quality time in the hospital. Turns out that can really weaken you so I was sent from there to a rehab facility. On day two in rehab I “walked” into the physical therapy room. I say walked but I mean struggled to get there using a walker with someone walking with me ready to catch me if I fell. To be fair it was a rather long walk. Something like 100 feet. Needless to say I was feeling rather sorry for myself but the boss (my amazing wife) had told me to work hard so I was trying. I sat down in my wheel chair to catch my breath and watched a man missing half of one of his legs doing his workout. He was walking. Not easily, and with crutches but he was doing it. A few days later I’m lifting weights (3 lbs) and again, struggling when I see a woman struggling to pick up a child’s block. She dropped it a few seconds later. I could easily tell another half a dozen stories of people who were far worse off than I was.

I was at once easily the sickest person in the facility, and the healthiest. In 6 months this will mostly just be history for me. These other people will be affected their whole lives. Now, did that make me any less unhappy about my discomfort and exhaustion? Of course not. (Although I will say it certainly helped my motivation seeing how hard they were working.)

I know we were all somewhat disappointed when Pass had to go away, no matter if you saw it coming or not. And I am also well aware that some people didn’t really love the idea of a for profit company coming in and buying the pieces. All of that said, I’m glad that some piece of it remains.

In spite of a few hiccups Redgate has done a fantastic job so far with the Summit this year and I truly appreciate it.

This is exactly what they needed to do.

DT built up a set of tests for the next deployment. They gave these tests to TT and asked for their help. TT said, This isn’t good enough. We need more test cases. Ok, fine DT built more. A test was scheduled, time was spent running it, a number of people from different teams were involved, and then afterwards TT said Still not good enough. We aren’t comfortable with the results so we won’t be giving them to you. More tests created. Still not good enough.

I’m sure just reading this you can feel the frustration of DT. TT just wouldn’t give them a win. Yes, DT really needed to get a full set of end to end tests set up, but that wasn’t going to happen overnight. And rather than helping them build up a set of tests and get there over time TT just frustrated them and in the end DT gave up. No more system testing for us.

Senior teams and individuals will frequently be working with juniors. And yes, it can get frustrating, but that’s no excuse not to be as helpful as possible. The goal is to bring a junior up through the ranks. And just to be clear. A senior in one subject will be a junior in other subjects. Say a DBA starting to work with aspects of Azure. (Totally not using myself as an example.)

One of the easiest ways to bring juniors up is to give them a win. In the case of DT if they had been given testing results, even with a series of disclaimers, they would have a win. Something they could build on. Next time they add more tests, and more, and more, and more. And eventually, over time, they end up with a mature testing environment.

Remember, you were a junior at one point too. In every subject. Weren’t those wins nice? Didn’t they encourage you to move forward? Well pass those wins on!

1. The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.
   • a person or thing that inspires.

 
I’ll be honest, I hate definitions that rely on a derivation of the original word, but here we go.

Inspires

1. Fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.

 
Better. So an inspiration is a person or thing that fills you with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially something creative. The middle of last year a good friend of mine, Malathi Mahadevan (blog|twitter), tweeted this:

And I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel. It got me thinking about what inspires me, and honestly, what inspiration is in general. For me my inspirations come from people. There are places I love and places where I feel more at home than others, but for inspiration, it’s almost always people.

Frequently it’s my family. My son is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, my daughter one of the most creative and my wife the most driven. I love jokes and I love putting them out on twitter. I’d say more than half the time I write down something funny it comes from my wife and kids.

Another great source of inspiration for me is the SQL community, sometimes called #sqlfamily. The kindness, generosity, intelligence, creativity and so on that I see every day from this group of people can’t help push me forwards and upwards. And finally, as corny as it may sound, I gain inspiration from you. The people who read the ramblings of someone who never considered himself good at writing, or teaching, or really anything but a few technical skills. So thank you for that.

Lastly, believe it or not, a great source of inspiration is people that irritate me . You start annoying me enough and I’ll write code to stop whatever you are doing. Aggravation has been the source of some of my best posts and best code in general.

Inspiration can come in many forms. I’ve seen the odd statement by someone that starts a train of thought and off I go into some odd or funny piece of code or joke or whatever. Heck, a simple thank you has sent me thinking and wondering for almost six months now.

So. What inspires you? What brings out your best? What can drive you onward and upward?

Thanks Mal, for being one of my sources of inspiration.

Today I want to write about one of my hobbies. I was actually discussing this with someone recently as one of my methods of stress relief. Now if you follow me on twitter then this comes as no surprise to you, but I make small metal models.

You can see I’ve made a few over the years. Here are a few I’ve done recently.

Aside from the fact that I have something afterward to put on my desk (the downside is dusting, I mean really, you have no idea), building these is awesome for stress relief. If I feel a need I can just grab my model (sitting right next to my laptop)

and put together the next piece.

There isn’t much thought involved so I can shut my brain down for a few minutes, or, more likely, process some stuff in the background. It’s also nice during meetings. I have a horrible habit of working, reading emails, etc during meetings. Recently I’ve started working on my models and have found that I can concentrate on the meeting without any effort.

IT, in general, is high stress. Our jobs involve tight deadlines, high precision, and a risk of costing the company a lot of money if you make a mistake. Not to mention DR .. I mean Disaster is right in the name. Stress relief is important to all of us and for me, these types of minimal thought hobbies (coloring books are another great example) are wonderful.

Next, let’s say you have a job that runs every few minutes checking if an instance is down. When that instance goes down you get an immediate email. Which is awesome! Of course then while you are trying to fix the issue you get dozens more emails about the same outage. That is at best distracting and at worst makes it take longer for you to fix the issue.

Ok, obviously event storming is bad. (Quick note, not all event storms are emails, that’s just the example I’m using here.) That said, what do we do about it? Reduce the number of events obviously. There are a few obvious methods here.

Better Thresholds
Let’s say you are alerting on the percentage of disk used. And you are using a default of > 80% used. Do you really need to know that you only have 500gb of your 3tb disk? You also want to collect baseline information (for many reasons) so you have a better idea of what your actual numbers are and can alert when these numbers move outside of your reasonable baselines. Erin Stellato (b/t) has a good article on SQL Server Central on Back to Basics: Capturing Baselines on Production SQL Servers to help you get started.

Consolidated Emails
Collect your data into a central repository, then send out alerts on the combined data. If you have 100 databases, or 1000 instances, then you don’t want to be sending out alerts on each individual piece of information. Collect it together, parse it, then send out a single consolidated alert. I wrote one system a while back that sent out 2 emails. One listed every database on every instance that didn’t have a backup within a reasonable amount of time, and the other checked things like online status. Each morning we had a status report of all of the problems (of those types) across all of our instances at once. A single email, not dozens.

Logic
Collect your data (like I said above) and apply logic to it. If you sent this alert out 5 minutes ago you don’t really need another one right now. Or maybe you do if the situation has gotten worse? Now eventually if the problem persists you want to send out another alert. But how long? Well it depends.

Also, time your alerts. Did your daily differential fail? You’re still recoverable right? Your logs are succeeding and you have a full from Saturday so you probably don’t need to send out an email about the failure at 3am. It can wait until morning.

Email Rules
You won’t always be able to control what alerts you are getting. They may be coming from other systems you don’t have access to, or you may just need to clear the chaff so you can start working on reducing what you can change. Create email rules. Shift events you know aren’t important off to a folder to be reviewed every now and again. You may lose some positives but if you are careful they won’t be many. And IMHO it’s better to lose a few positives (depending on what they are) than start ignoring everything because you are being flooded.

The client had requested a meeting. They had a new, complex, system they wanted implemented in the software we managed for them. The client was very very excited. I was not excited. I was annoyed. I (in my youthful experience) felt it was unwise, difficult, and all round a stupid idea. I walked in with a chip on my shoulder. I took the first opportunity to take offense. I tore the poor woman’s document up one side and down the other. I pointed out logical flaws, grammatical flaws and anything else I could find. I was truly unpleasant. And I walked out of the meeting not realizing I was in the slightest bit upset.

One of my co-workers pulled me aside as we walked out of the meeting saying “Wow, you really lost your temper there.”

My response: “Really?” I honestly hadn’t noticed. I’d lost my temper, brought someone almost to tears, and hadn’t noticed.

I should probably throw in a little background at this point. I was working for a moderately large company that was growing quickly. ~20 DBAs and maybe 500-600 people total. I’d been working with this client for about two years, and it was our largest client. Even then I was considered one of the better DBA/developers (say top 2-3 of the 20 of us).

The client (of course) asked that I immediately be fired. And I don’t blame them in the slightest. I got very, very, outrageously lucky and the CIO told them I was the only one capable of working their account. That they would start looking for someone else but I was going to have to continue to work on it for at least 6 months. I was then called in and told off.

I worked my rear off that next 6 months. Anything that client wanted was done almost instantly. The process she was so excited about? I did it. I did everything I could to make that client happy. At the end of that 6 months the client and I had worked things out (mostly). She was happy with me, and I’d learned a very important lesson.

In fact I learned two. First of all I had a problem. I’ve always known that I have hard time dealing with and understanding others. Over the years the database stuff has come relatively easy, I mean I enjoy it after all. But I’ve had to work hard over the years to get better at dealing with people. I’ve learned to remain calm when working with people. To encourage and to teach. I even enjoy it. In fact I’ve gotten good enough that I occasionally get compliments on my reviews, but I’ve never forgotten that this is not my strong suit.

The next thing I learned is that control is not enough. You can learn self control all you want but it occasionally fails you. I had to learn how to release negative emotions and thoughts. That’s where communication comes in.

A few weeks ago I found out I was meeting with a vendor to explain a process I was working on. I wasn’t overly pleased by this. I expected trouble and I could very easily have gotten it. I found my heart beat getting faster and I’m sure my blood pressure was going up too. And this was 48 hours prior to the meeting! If I’d stamped down on those feelings, bottled them up and let them fester they could very easily have come boiling out during this meeting. I would have been a problem. Regardless of what the other person did. So what did I do?

I talked to a couple of my co-workers. They’ve dealt with the same people and could sympathize. They were nothing more than a sympathetic ear and let me vent some steam to someone who felt the same way.

I called my wife and talked to her. I love my wife, and she loves me. She didn’t understand but she didn’t have to. She was a loving non-judgmental ear. She let me vent without adding anything.

I wrote a blog post on the subject (blog post recursion!) This let me solidify how I felt. You’d be amazed how much writing something down so that someone else can understand it forces you to think through it and get all the feelings straight.

And I started to calm down. Over that 48 hours I got a hold of myself. I made sure my process was bullet proof. I researched the few pieces that I wasn’t 100% comfortable with.

The day of the meeting came. I presented my idea. The vendor complimented me! Everything was as smooth as you could wish. The members of my team were happy. The vendor was happy. The developers who had called the meeting were thrilled. But oh how easily it could have gone wrong. And it would have been my fault. Again.

So the thought of the day? Temper temper!

You’re back? Good. So, her article got me thinking. This is a subject near and dear to my heart.

I have two children, a boy and a girl. Both are amazingly intelligent and both very very different. We frequently call my son the data child and my daughter the creative one. This is for very specific reasons. My son has a hard time thinking outside of the box. Give him straight up logic and he is a genus. Ask him to be creative and he struggles. My daughter is the opposite. Given a Lego set she will put it together given the instructions and take it apart over and over again. Then she branches out on her own and make the most amazing things. This is a child that rarely plays games by the rules, she takes the pieces and re-purposes them for new and exciting things.

So given all of that what do we think they will do in the future? No clue to be honest. My son at the moment is interested in teaching theater and my daughter has a strong interest in geology and chemistry. Neither one has much interest, at the moment, in computers (outside of playing video games). But that may change. If it does, great, if not so what?

The upshot of all of this is that I want my children to get to make their own choices in life. I don’t want either one of them to feel there are any restrictions in what they choose to do with their life. How do we make that happen? I’m honestly not sure. I think realizing that there is a problem, that we have stereotypes, and make snap (and often incorrect) judgments is probably a good start. It saddens me to realize that in the 21st century we think that gender has anything to do with intelligence or career aptitude.

If you are a woman: The sky’s the limit. If you have an interest in IT pursue it. If you have an interest in Chemistry, English, Math, anything really, then go for it. If on the other hand you want to be a home maker, go for that. Lord knows it’s a harder job than anything I do.

If you are a man (particularly those in IT) working with a women: Congrats! She probably had to work harder and be better in order to get half the recognition you did. Show respect and be happy that you are working with someone who can and will pull their own weight. Oh, and if you want to be a home maker, go for it. I know several men who are and are very happy.

P.S. Don’t get me started on bias against religion, color, gender choices etc. All of these things are pretty superficial don’t you think? We are all people. Don’t we deserve to be treated as such?

Howdy #sqlfamily. Say hi if you get a chance!