Instead of working, I blog.

I managed to take the 70-450 exam for Katmai a couple weeks ago and I was surprised to find that I got a powershell question.

As well, I was looking through some practice questions for the Katmai Dev exam (don’t remember the number)and there were a couple powershell questions on there as well. 

So I’ve been saying to people for 2yrs now that they’d better start learning powershell and now it’s starting to creep into exams even.  So you guys get boned up on your powershell and feel free to write me if you don’t know where to even get started.  I’ll be glad to help.

I'm on a mini vacation in Santa Monica and of course I took my computer and blackberry because a DBA is never really off-call.
I took a couple calls today and answered a couple emails to which my boss replied... maybe I should remind you what vacation means.

And it's not that I don't know what vacation means, it's that I really don't mind taking a couple mins here and there to make sure things are going ok while I'm gone. It's kind of a small price to pay really.

So I head home tomorrow evening and I'll be back in the office wed.

I even managed to learn something on this trip. I've never tried searching for an object that doesn't exist but I was reading on the plane that if you enter in an object name that doesn't exist into Object_ID(), it returns NULL. Good stuff that. So consider that your trivia for the day.

Is there someone at work you just can’t stand?  That one guy who is a thorn in your side at every turn and not only do you not get along with him, but he’s just as stupid as the day is long…

Well I’ve found an excellent way to divert myself from how much I hate that guy.  I write the scripts to remove their access from all the servers and put them in a dir and just wait for the opportunity to use them.  There’s really something about getting out of a meeting with a guy you just can’t stand and going back to your desk and writing his drop login statements.

Try it, you’ll love it.

What do you do when someone at work is gunning for you?

I’ve started up a discussion on the IW forum.

I’d like you to take a look at it because this could be a huge topic.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/forums/gunning-you-747

 

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

I spent the week at TechED in L.A. and I had the (good?) fortune to sit in on a couple .Net sessions.  The most memorable of course, and the one that attracted me to begin with was on data access tricks.  I didn’t have a session guide with me at the time so I didn’t know it was a .Net session till I got there, but man, once i started listening i was amazed.

Ok, so the course was about data access tricks… and hearing .Net guys talk about SQL and DB access is like listening to your 5yr old explaining to your 3yr old why it rains.  It’s no wonder why there are so many poor apps out there when one of the big data access tricks is to create a view in the DB for large joins.  Now, I’m not saying that the guy suggested using a view instead of putting a large join query on the front end… no, not quite.  He was actually announcing it like it had just been created… the latest thing developed by the SQL world to get around an age old problem.  And I’ll tell you too… the ooos and aaaahs were plentiful.

Another good one was creating a view to get around all that pesky crap the DBAs make you do like solving many-to-many queries with lookup tables.  The way they were whining about that and saying what nonsense it was is incredible.  I thought about raising my hand and offering some constructive criticism on the matter, but I get enough of those conversations at home when I’m arguing with my kids about why they can’t have candy for dinner in the middle of the street.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t mind this kind of thing too much, but I think part of the problem with .Net devs being so puerile about these things is that their leaders aren’t guiding them.  Because instead of complaining about DBAs making them use lookup tables, which are necessary in many designs, he could have approached it from the professional angle of… hey you know how you have to solve a many-to-many with lookup tables and how much work that is on the front end?  Well here’s an idea, have your DBAs give you a view for that on the back end and you can just select from it in your C# code.  Now that makes .Net guys sound like professionals who know a thing or 2 about coding and about data access instead of whiney babies who are being made to go to bed early by the DBAs.

So I know I’ve said this before but it bears repeating because it keeps coming up… devs just don’t get it.  And seriously guys, if you really can’t see why your DBAs make you do the things you do, then you deserve this rant.

You take performance and concurrency pretty seriously in your apps, so why can’t you apply that to your data access as well?  So it’s time to grow up and become real adult IT folk.