July 2005 - Posts
Interesting
post by Andy Leonard.
I'll add in my two cents that you should seek happiness and
satisfaction in your job. I totally understand that people get caught
in situations, have responsbilities, obligations, and financial reasons
for taking or keeping a job, but that should be a short term thing.
Keep your eye on what makes you happy and helps you enjoy life.
And if you are stuck in a job you don't like, be sure that you make the
rest of your life better to compensate. Spend more time on a hobby,
family, take more long weekends, etc. to be sure that you don't
overload yourself with stress over a bad job.
for a week. I'm leaving for vacation and leaving SQLServerCentral.com
in the capable hands of Andy. He'll be sending out some canned
editorials as he's pretty busy at work, may be some interesting
articles coming our way soon, so if things don't appear, it's his fault
:)
Actually things should be fine and I'm loading my Dell 9300 up with
scripts and such to be ready for the trip. If I need to, I can sneak
down a few blocks to the Jewish Mother, a Va Beach
instituion/restaurant/bar/deli/wireless access spot, to help things
along.
Had some interesting SQL discussions this week with friends. One
looking to get the edition (Std, Enterprise, etc) from a server without
it being running. The other working on performance issues, some funny
interview stories, and more. Despite a slow SQL Server week in the
news, it's been an interesting SQL Server week here.
Enjoy yourselves, get testing on SQL Server 2005, and send some more
articles. I've got a bunch going now, but it seems to come in waves, so
I'd rather have a few more weeks worth in the pipeline. You might think
that no one will learn anything from you or that everyone else has
already learned the mistake you just made, but I guarentee you're
wrong. Write something down and I'll work with you to get it published.
A couple of days ago I noticed that the index rebuild for the search
engine was failing at night. In line with that, a few people reported
getting some errors about the engine running out of memory when
searching for things. As usual, I could not duplicate their results,
but I decided I needed a reboot anyway.
So I planned on doing one Tuesday night after my meeting for our neighborhood's architectural committee.
And forgot.
So I planned on Wed. after my board meeting.
And forgot.
Then today I noticed that one of the message jobs that unsubscribes
people had failed. So I tried to run it and got a memory error,
actually a Windows error that some collection in DMO could not be
filled. So I decided not to chance my failing memory again and rebooted
around 9:45am MST this morning. Everything went well, which was good
since I had a 10:00 appt with a friend
Now everything appears to be running fine. The database server has been
live for months, but I'm a little worried now that there is some leak
in the search engine. It's been getting hit hard lately.
Apologies, a minor reboot of the db server this morning. Somewhere we're leaking memory, more details later, so I had to reboot.
When I started working at JD Edwards, I was a corporate administrator
on the windows network. Since the DBAs were a part of this group, we
had domain admin privleges to accomplish all work necessary. But we
didn't just get domain admins rights on our accounts, we had a separate
"sa" account that we were supposed to log into when we needed the
rights to do work.
I know I've mentioned this before. It seemed like all my work was, or
most was, admin work, requiring privleges. So I wasn't intersted in
checking email or the ticket Q for work, logging off, logging on, doing
work, logging off, etc. So we had email linked to our "sa" account and
we could at least work though we were supposed to log off for non-work
related stuff, I guess cruising the I-net, etc.
This was when I wan Windows 2000 and so someone came up with the
idea of using RUNAS and sticking with your regular account and doing a
"runas" with your SA account for work. Well, it didn't work very well
for me, so I abandoned it pretty quickly. After all, we were pretty
busy and I wasn't interested in spending a lot of time messing with
something that didn't work easily and quickly.
So when I got this new laptop, I decided to setup a "regular" power
user under XP Pro that didn't have admin privleges. I was surprised how
many installs brought up the "run as" box and asked me to type in the
administrator password. It seemed to work pretty well.
Until today. I was looking to install the June CTP and it
complained I needed to run the "build uninstall tool" before
preceeding. Never mind it didn't just give me a button to launch it, I
had to find it by browsing the CD to the "Setup Tools" folder.
So clicked it, it ran and asked to uninstall .NET 2.0, SSIS, and
something else. I said go and it complained I didn't have admin
privleges. OK, so I logged out, but then stopped. Why not give this a
try. I logged back in as "Steve" and right clicked the Build Uninstall
Utility, checked the "run as Admin box and typed the password and off
it went. Pretty cool!
As
Phill posts in his blog, we've had a couple interesting threads in the forums where the respect and tolerance level has been a little low. My
last post shows me getting annoyed with an emailer and the same thing happens in the forums.
For the most part, people seem to have some respect and are willing to
help and even give others a hard time. I know we've had some fun
discussions in various posts and who can forget all the congratualtions
for Frank. (
MVP Status,
4500 posts, etc). But there are times that people really go over the line.
I guess it's just part of a community, good and bad. You can't have everything go well.
I got a note that someone thought they shouldn't have to register on
the site and get a newsletter to read posts. I explained, or I thought
I did that there's a cost and that we do not send out SPAM since it's
not unsolicitied. Here's what I get back:
You've pretty much told me my opinion doesn't count. That
being the case, I would say you are not sorry in the slightest that I
feel this way and your "empathy" is about as sincere as a used cars
salesman's.
Some people would jump off a bridge because "everybody else is doing so."
That's no excuse. Check out some of your competition at, for
example, VBCity, which recently dropped their requirement to register
because they were losing subscribers. Or how about P2P/Wrox?
Here's some simple advice that many other web sites have found equally
profuitable to SPAM: how about just putting some simple ads on
your pages, to be viewed by those both reading and writing posts.
Then you could drop the SPAM disguised as a "newsletter" bullshit and
be on the up-and-up for a change. Few folks read newsletters
anyway. When I want information, at least, I go looking for it as
I did today - I don't wait for a SPAMMER to send it to me. I
don't have time to read every scrap of SPAM that gets sent to my inbox
anyway, and your advertisers are fools if they think I do. In
fact, I boycott SPAMMERS for teh fact that they use SPAM to make money
as you have demonstrated below you are doing.
Just because you say it isn't SPAM does not make it so. I've
heard that same stupid excuse from every SPAMMER out there I've
contacted. If I didn't
ask for it it's SPAM. If I don't want it, it's SPAM. Like Bush, you can
lie to yourself, but you're not fooling me with your double
speak. SPAM is SPAM is SPAM and no amount of denial on your part
will change that. Making money sending unsolicited emails
containing advertisements makes you a SPAMMER, regardless of what
you're using that money for.
Whereas you, OTOH, are paying folks for the information you're guarding
so jealously? Or do you, perhaps, think their information should
be FREE to YOU to make money off of? Pot, kettle, black, pal!
Whether you make money from your site is not my concern, and the fact
that you even try to excuse this condition by mentioning your need to
make money just exposes you for the greedy sycophant you are. I
support the sites that work for me but I can't even tell whether you
have the information I need without first subjecting myself to your
SPAM. I support a community of developers who willingly share
their expertise not those who wish to profit from their hard work.
When I wrote the editorial for today on
A Humbling Experience,
I was sure that it would generate a bunch of feedback and reads.
Instead, as of 10:00am MST, when there are often 2-3, sometimes 10
posts, there are none. And only 16 reads!!! Probably 6 of those are
mine in getting the ed tested and checking for replies.
It's funny that sometimes I can guesss that certain things will or will
not do well. Like reviews: I know these will usually be 500-800 reads.
It's just not that compelling for most people. However things that are
mistakes, like the In The Real World mistake series Andy and I wrote
and the DBA Whoops will get 4-5000 reads. The articles on NULLs will
get 4000 reads on the first day. As an aside, a normal article usually
gets 1500-2000 reads the first day.
But aside from those, I find myself often surprised by what really gets
the most reads and what generates feedback and interest. I've given up
predicting for the most part, but sometimes I guess just for fun. I
know I certainly couldn't make any money on my prognasticatory skills.
:)
Andy and I had an interesting question on this today. He's trying to
hire a DBA and he had his first phone interview with a guy that
supposedly had 10 years of experience. One of the first questions was
asking about a table with 3 columns, two of which were in the clustered
index. A particular query that referenced all 3 columns had a bookmark
lookup. He asked how to make it run faster.
Now I know it's a loaded question, somewhat, and there are lots of factors, but would you answer like this?
And then mention that you'd need to rebuild the index every night so that changes to the underlying table would show up.
I'm sorry, but I think that either you've substantially misrepresented
yourself or your 10 years involved no problems or actual work and
mostly just holding a title.
It got us thinking about what questions to ask and how to evaluate
someone. We also discussed how you should handle an interview. I wrote
an article (
Who Do You Hire?) a few years ago, but it's probably time for an update.