SQLFamily

Roll With The Punches – #opentowork #sqlfamily #datafam

For a lot of Salesforce employees, January 4, 2023 was not a good day. I was standing in my kitchen, getting my kid ready for school when I got the email at 6:16 AM EST.

Hi Stuart,
As we announced earlier today, we’re reducing our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks. Unfortunately, as part of this reduction your role is being eliminated.

Shock. Confusion. Acceptance. Thankfully, the severance package is good, and I have time to find the next opportunity.

I had only recently joined Salesforce (on February 7, 2022) after a lengthy career at Jack Henry. I had big plans. I was going places. I liked my job with Tableau on the CI Infrastructure team, and had been exposed to some great ideas, and had big plans to tackle some interesting challenges this year. In fact, I was already planning on writing a version of this blog post in preparation for the upcoming V2MOM process. One of my values can be summed up with the quote from Mike Tyson:

Plans change. They sometimes shatter like glass. But how do you recover when you’re reeling in pain from something? You go back to the fundamentals.

The fundamentals are those skills you’ve built over the years through practice. They should be automatic in times of crisis. Boxers constantly work on the fundamentals of their craft well before a big fight. They can walk into a ring with big plans, but when the blows start landing and the plans fall apart, what saves them is always going to be how well they can marshal the fundamentals.

As a manager in the technology space looking for my next opportunity, I’m going to sharpen the three following fundamentals:

First, my network of peers is large, and filled with good people. I was frankly overwhelmed by the number of people that reached out to ask how they could help and offered up leads. I am grateful, and it just makes me want to continue to invest more in building relationships.

Second, my technical expertise is T-shaped; I’ve got some in-depth knowledge of database architecture and performance tuning, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of ideas for software deployment across the lifecycle. I’m going to continue to work on some weaker areas (Git, Linux, Powershell) while I search for the right opportunity.

Third, I’m a Work From Home master. I’ve been working from home for the last 17 years of my career. You want a manager who understands how to motivate a remote team and build a remote culture? Boom, I can do it. You need somebody who can set deadlines and expectations around work\life balance? That’s me.

I got this.

If you wanna see what my career looks like, add me on LinkedIn: Stuart Ainsworth | LinkedIn

Look Mom, I’m famous….

Well, moderately well-known 😛

I had the pleasure of being a guest on Andy Leonard and Frank LaVigne‘s podcast, Data Driven.  I was originally going to talk about #SQLFamily, Azure DataFest, and community life in general, but the topic quickly changed in light of the Azure outage on the day we recorded it (9/4/2018).  So we rambled on, joked a lot, threw in some 80’s pop culture references, and generally had a good time. Give it a listen on your favorite podcasting app.

Hopefully this will inspire me to find time to write more.  We touched on a lot of ideas, but didn’t really dive very deeply into any of them.  I need to stop DOING, and WRITE IT DOWN (that’s a variant of the advice I give my team).

 

 

Azure DataFest Boston 2018 – Another Call For Speakers for #SQLFamily

I’ve recently gotten involved with Azure Data Fest, a new tech conference focused on the cloud version of the Microsoft Data Platform.  The second event is being held in Boston on March 1, 2018.  They’re actively looking for community speakers, and their call ends on February 9th.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/call-for-speakers-azure-datafest-microsoft-azure-advanced-analytics-and-big-data-conference-boston-registration-40984247989

Sessions should cover one of more of the following:

Azure Data Warehouse
Power BI
Cosmos DB
Azure Analysis Services
HDInsight
Machine Learning
Stream Analytics
Cognitive Services
Azure Bot Services
Data Lake Analytics
Data Lake Store
Data Factory
Power BI Embedded
Data Catalog
Log Analytics
Apache Spark for Azure HDInsight
Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights
Custom Speech Service
APIs: Emotion, face, Bing Speech, Web Language Model, Speaker Recognition, Bing Autosuggest, Bing Spell Check, Translator Speech, Translator Text

#FAIL

There’s been some great discussion in the #SQLFamily after Brent Ozar published a recent blog post: I Failed 13 College Courses. Lots of comments on Facebook about it, and other people soon came forward with their own brief tales of academic failure (and subsequent successes). I was particularly touched by Mike Walsh’s video (What Advice Should I Share on Career Day?), where he talked about dropping out of high school. Most of the conversations were about the struggles in academia, but there was real underlying thread: You can succeed and be happy after facing failure.

I’m friends with a lot of smart, successful people, and for those of us that are engaged in information industry, failing at an intellectual exercise (like college or high school) can be perceived as a mark of shame. I think what Brent, Mike, and others are showing is that recovering from failure is not only possible, but normal. We all fail at something, and that often puts on a new path to figuring out something else. Failure teaches us more than success.

My Story…

(Note: I just realized that my last blog post touched on this story briefly. Must be on my mind a lot lately.)

I didn’t fail in high school (WMHS, 1989).

I didn’t fail during my Bachelor’s degree (ULM, 1993 – B.A, RadioTVFilm Production).

I didn’t fail during my first Master’s degree (ULM, 1995 – M.A, Communication).

I didn’t fail on my coursework for my doctoral degree. (UGA, PhD coursework completed in 1999).

Nope. I waited until I was 28 years old (with a wife and two kids depending on me) to fail at my first academic exercise. I bombed my doctoral comprehensive exams not once, but twice over a 6 month period. In April of 2000, I was waiting outside my major advisor’s office to discuss my options for a third attempt. I waited for two hours, brooding over the shape of my life at the moment. She never came, so I walked out the door and didn’t go back (stopping at a bookstore on the way home to purchase two books on SQL). I didn’t hear from her until a few years ago when she friended me on Facebook, and we’ve never really discussed it. I’m happy, and she’s moved on to greater successes as well.

As an aside to this story, I had been working at the American Cancer Society while going to school; my official title on most publications was Research Assistant, but I was the shadow DBA for the Behavioral Research Center. I had been working with Microsoft Access to manage contact information for cancer registries as well as using SPSS with SQL to analyze data. I parlayed that interest in data management into a new job in August of 2000; I had decided that I wasn’t cut out for anything academic, and I wanted to move into IT full time.

I did go back in 2001 to finish a second Master’s degree in Education (UGA, 2002 – M.Ed. Instructional Technology). Yes, I have three college degrees, and none of them are in information Technology.

What I Learned…

Lots of lessons I picked up out of this.

First, I learned that the fear of failure often motivates me to pick the easier path. Looking back over my academic career, I’ve always been smart enough to know what my limitations are, and lazy enough to not challenge them. I got a degree in Radio Production, not just because I enjoyed the theatrical end musical elements but also because I knew I didn’t have to take harder courses (like Chemistry, Physics or Calculus; all of I which I had managed to avoid in High School). I used to think it was working smarter, not harder; in hindsight, I just didn’t want to fail.

Second, a fear of failure often blinds me from looking at the bigger picture. When I’m scared that something is going off the rails, my instinct is to drive forward at full speed and force it to succeed. Over time, I’ve learned to be sensitive to those warning signs, and try to put the brakes on and redirect. At several points in my graduate career, I knew that I was in the wrong field. But I had a job in academic research, and I had never failed before, so I was going to see this through and will it to be. That obviously didn’t work.

Third, fail early, because failing late in the game is expensive. I racked up over $120,000 in student loans in my doctoral program; if I had recognized early on that I wasn’t going to be happy, I could have avoided that. If I had challenged myself earlier with smaller risks, I might have predicted that academia wasn’t for me. Hindsight is amazingly clear; in the thick of it, however, I’ve learned that it’s best to take small risks when possible, and fail often. Failing at something gives you two choices: you challenge yourself to try something different and succeed in the future, or you curl up in a ball and “accept your limitations”. It’s easier to bounce back when the consequences of the failure are small.

Summary

I’m no guru; I’m just a guy trying to figure it all out just like you. I’ve gone on to have other epic failures, as well as some incredible successes. I will say that my own personal journey has resonated with my perspectives on software and service development recently. Below are some great reads about failure.

Successful Failure

Fail Fast and Fail Hard

Blameless post mortems – strategies for success

Oh, The Places You’ll Go! – #SQLSeuss #SQLPASS

Last week, I had the privilege to speak at the annual PASS Summit; I got to present two different sessions, but the one I’m the most proud of was my Lightning Talk: Oh, the Places You’ll Go! A Seussian Guide to the Data Platform. I bungled the presentation a bit (sorry for those of you who want to listen to it), but I feel pretty good about the content. I’ve presented it below, with the slides that I used for the talk.

The goal of this presentation was to explore the Microsoft Data Platform from the perspective of a SQL Server professional; I found this great conceptual diagram of the platform from this website a while back, and wanted to use it as a framework. I figured the best way to teach a subject was the same way I teach my 3-year-old: a little bit of whimsy.

Enjoy.

You have brains in your head

And SQL Skills to boot

You’ll soar to great heights

On the Data Platform too

You’re on your own, and you know what you know,

And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.

You’ve mastered tables, columns and rows, OHHHHH MYYYY

You may even have dabbled in a little B.I.

You’re a data professional, full of zest,

But now you’re wondering “What comes next?”

Data! It’s more than just SQL,

And there’s a slew of it coming, measured without equal.

Zettabytes, YotaBytes, XenoBytes and more

All coming our way, faster than ever before.

So what should we do? How should we act?

Should we rest on our laurels? Should we lie on our backs?

Do we sit idly by, while the going gets tough?

No… no, we step up our game and start learning new stuff!

 

Oh, the places you’ll go!

ARCHITECTURE

Let’s start with the Theories,

The things you should know

Designing systems as services,

Are the route you might go.

Distributed, scalable

Compute on Demand

The Internet of Things

And all that it commands.

Infrastructure is base,

Platform is in line

Software and data

Rest on top of design

Once you’ve grasped this

Once you’ve settled in

You’ve embraced cloud thinking

Even while staying on-prem.

But beyond the cloud, there’s data itself.

Structured, polyschematic, binary, and log

Centralized or on the edge,

Some might say “in the fog”

Big Data, Fast Data, Dark, New and Lost

All of it needs management, all at some cost

There’s opportunity there to discover something new

But it will take somebody, somebody with skills like you.

Beyond relational, moving deep into insight

We must embrace new directions, and bring data to life

And there’s so many directions to go!

ADMINISTRATORS

For those of you who prefer administration

System engineering and server calibration

You need to acknowledge, and you probably do

You’ll manage more systems, with resources few.

Automation and scripting are the tools of the trade

Learn powershell to step up your game.

Take what you know about managing SQL

And apply it to more tech; you’ll be without equal

Besides the familiar, disk memory CPU

There’s virtualization and networking too

In the future you might even manage a zoo,

Clustering elephants, and a penguin or two.

 

But it all hinges on answering things

Making servers reliable and performance tuning,

Monitoring, maintenance, backup strategies

All of these things you do with some ease.

And it doesn’t matter if the data is relational

Your strategies and skills will make you sensational

All it takes is some get up, and little bit of go

And you’re on your way, ready to know.

So start building a server, and try something new

SQL Server is free, Hadoop is too.

Tinker and learn in your spare time

Let your passions drive you and you’ll be just fine

DEVELOPERS

But maybe you’re a T-SQL kind of geek,

And it’s the languages of data that you want to speak

There’s lots of different directions for you

Too many to cover, but I’ll try a few

You could talk like a pirate

And learn to speak R

Statistics, and Science!

I’m sure you’ll go far

Additional queries for XML and JSON

Built in SQL Server, the latest edition.

You can learn HiveQL, if Big Data’s your thing

And interface with Tez, Spark, or just MapReducing

U_SQL is the language of the Azure Data Lake

A full-functioned dialect; what progress you could make!

There’s LINQ and C-Sharp, and so many more

Ways to write your code against the datastores

You could write streaming queries against Streaminsight

And answer questions against data in flight.

And lest I overlook, or lest I forget,

There’s products and processes still to mention yet.

SSIS, SSAS, In-memory design

SSRS, DataZen, and Power BI

All of these things, all of these tools

Are waiting to be used, are waiting for you.

You just start down the path, a direction you know

And soon you’ll be learning, your brain all aglow

And, oh, the places you’ll go.

And once you get there, wherever you go.

Don’t forget to write, and let somebody know.

Blog, tweet, present what you’ve mastered

And help someone else get there a little faster.

Feel free to leave a comment if you like, or follow me on Twitter: @codegumbo

#SQLPASS – Fluffy Bunnies

File:Fluffy white bunny rabbit.jpgI didn’t really have a good name for this post, so I thought I’d just try to pick something as non-offensive as possible.  Everybody likes bunnies, right?  Anyway, the last series of posts that I’ve made regarding the Professional Association for SQL Server has raised a number of questions that I thought I’d strive to answer; since I’m still mulling over my next post, I figured this was as good a time as any. 

What’s your motivation in writing this series?

Believe it or not, I’m trying to help.  For several years, it seems like there’s been one controversy after the other within the Professional Association of SQL Server, and those controversies dissipate and re-emerge.  My goal is to document what I perceive to be the root causes for some of these issues so that we can work toward a solution.

 

Why are you bashing PASS?

I’m trying very hard to NOT “bash” the Professional Association for SQL Server; I’ve been a member for several years now, and I’ve seen controversies get personal.  I really don’t feel like I’m doing that; I still believe that the Board of Directors are a great bunch of people that are making decisions based on their circumstance at the time.  I’m trying to wrap a schema around those circumstances, so I can understand those decisions. 

I’m trying to articulate my own perspective on what I think is wrong, so that I can be better prepared to have an honest discussion about those perceptions.  Relationships aren’t about ignoring issues; the first step in addressing an issue is to identify the issue.

You mentioned “transparency” as an issue with the BoD before; what do you mean by that?

That’s more complicated to answer than I thought it would be.  At first, I thought it was more information; as an active community member, I felt like I needed to be more involved in the decision-making process.  However, I can’t really name a specific reform that I would make for the BoD to be more transparent.  I don’t want to read meeting minutes, and most of the form letter emails I get from the Association go straight to the trash; I’m too busy for them to be transparent.

On further consideration, what I’ve been calling transparency is more about leadership and up-front communication than it is about revealing information.   As an example, I help run one of the largest SQL Server chapters in the world; if I had realized that the Professional Association for SQL Server was planning a major re-branding exercise, I feel like I could have contributed some “notes from the field” on what that would mean, and how to best prepare our membership for it.  Instead of appearing defensive about a controversy, the Board would appear to be very proactive.

It’s that feeling of being left out of the conversation that bothers me, I think.  I realize that there’s some details that can’t be shared, but I feel like the onus is on the BoD to find better ways to communicate with members (and to me, chapters are an underused resources).  The information flow is very unidirectional; Summit keynotes and email blasts are not an effective way to discuss an issue.   Maybe those conversations are happening with other people, but if so, few people have stepped forward discussing them.

It’s also an issue of taking action when an issue is raised; for example, the recent passwordsecurity controversy was documented by Brent Ozar.  He states that he and several other security-oriented members had several private conversation with board members, and yet no comprehensive action was taken until it became a public issue.  The perception is that the only way to get the BoD to act is to publically shame them.   That’s not healthy in the long run.

What’s your vision for the Association?

That’s the subject of my next post, so I’m going to hold off on that one.  I do think that the unidirectional flow of communication is not just an issue with the organization, but that it’s a tone set by our relationship with Microsoft.  As I pointed out in my last post, if the Association knew more about the needs and desires of the membership, that knowledge becomes a very valuable resource.   Instead of being a fan club for a product, we could become strong partners in the development of features for that product.

How do you feel about the name change?

Frankly, I feel a little sad about the change in direction, but I understand it.  I predict that SQL Server as on premise-platform is going to become a niche product, regardless of the number of installations.  It just makes sense for Microsoft to broaden their data platform offerings.  I do think that we (the Association) need to do a better job of preparing membership for this new frontier, and it’s going to take efforts to transform administration skills into analytic skills. Without providing that guidance, it seems like we’re abandoning the people who helped build this organization.

Where is this series headed?  What’s the final destination?

To be honest, I don’t know.  When I first started writing these posts, I was sure that I could describe exactly what was wrong, and suggest a few fixes.  The more I write, the easier it is to articulate my observations; I’m surprised to find that my observations are not what I thought they would be.  Thanks for joining me for the ride; hopefully, it leads to some interesting conversations at Summit.

#SQLPASS–Data Professionals?

So, in my last post, I described the financial pressures of community building; two companies benefit from building a community organization.  I’ve tried to stay away from assumptions, but I am assuming that their influence must factor into the Board of Directors’ decision making process (Microsoft has a seat on the board; C&C is dependent on the decisions that the BoD makes).  The metrics that matter most to Microsoft are the breadth of people interested in their product line, not the depth of knowledge attained by those people.

Influence isn’t a bad thing per se, but in my mind, it does explain why good people continue to make bad decisions, regardless of who gets elected to the board.   What do I mean by a bad decision?  In general, the Professional Association for SQL Server BoD remains a non-committal and opaque organization.  Board members have personally promised me that “they would look into something”, and yet the follow-thru never materialized; the opacity of the decision making process is documented by other other bloggers in posts like the following:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/steve_jones/2010/06/30/pass_2C00_-don_1920_t-waste-my-time/

https://ozar.me/2014/09/bigger-passvotes-problem-password-shared/

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/andy_leonard/archive/2014/06/27/pass-and-summit-2014-session-selections.aspx

SIDEBAR: I will say that the Board continues to work on the transparency problem; Jen Stirrup and Tom LaRock have both stepped forward to explain decisions made.  However, such explanations are usually given after a controversy has occurred.

For a specific example, I want to focus on the branding decision (the decision to remove SQL Server from marketing material for the Professional Association of SQL Server and to be know simply as PASS); the decision to move the organization away from its lingua franca of SQL Server to a new common language of “all things (Microsoft) data” is not in and of itself a bad thing.  Recent marketing trends from Microsoft indicate that the traditional role of the DBA is continuing to evolve; as individuals, we need to evolve as well.

However, as database professionals (or data professionals), we should be inclined to make decisions based on data.  As Jen Stirrup herself says:

I think it’s important to have a data-based, fact based look at the business analytics sphere generally. What does the industry say about where the industry is going? What does the data say? We can then look at how PASS fits in with this direction.

Jen’s post goes on to state some great statistics about the nature of the industry as a whole, but then uses some less concrete measures (growth of the BA/BI Virtual Chapters) to identify support within the organization.  I generally agree with her conclusions, but I’m concerned about several unanswered questions, most of them stemming from two numbers:

  • Association marketing materials claim we have reached over 100,000 professionals, and
  • 11,305 members were eligible to vote (a poor measure of involvement, but does indicate recent interaction).

I look at those two numbers and wonder why that gap is there; just for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that 90% of “members” have not updated their profile.  Why?  What could the Association have done to reach those members?  Who are those members?   What are their interests?  What’s a better metric for gauging active membership?

Of course, once I start asking questions, I begin to ask more questions: How many members don’t fit into Microsoft’s vision of cloud-based computing?   How many members use multiple technologies from the Microsoft data analysis stack? What skills should they be taught?  What skills do they have?  What features do they want?  The short answer: we don’t know.

As far as I know, there has been no large scale data collection effort by the Board of Directors to help guide their decisions; in the absence of data, good managers make a decision based on experience, but then strive to collect data to help with future decisions.  Continuing to rely on experience and marketing materials without investing in understanding member concern, desires, and input is simply put, a bad decision.

Shifting an organization that shared a common love for a particular technology to an organization that is more generally interested in data is a huge undertaking; overlooking the role that the community should have in determining the path of that transition is an oversight.   I don’t think the Professional Association for SQL Server is going to revert back to a technology-specific focus; that would be inconsistent with the changing nature of our profession.  However, the Board needs to continue to understand who the membership is, and how the organization can help a huge number of SQL Server professionals transition to “data professionals”.   Building a bigger umbrella may help the organization grow; investing in existing community members will help the organization succeed.

#SQLPASS–Who’s Making It Rain?

 

As promised in my previous post (#SQLPASS–Good people, bad behavior…), I’d like to start diving in to some of the controversies that have cropped up in the last year and critically analyze what I consider to be “bad decisions”.  This first one is complex, so let me try to sum up the players involved first (with yet another post to follow about the actual decision).  Please note that I am NOT a fan of conspiracy theories (no evil masterminds plotting to rule SQL Server community), so I’m trying to avoid inferring too much about motive, and instead focusing on observable events.

A lot of the hubbub over the last couple of weeks about the Professional Association for SQL Server wasn’t just about the election or the password controversy, but about the decision to become simply PASS in all marketing materials (gonna need a new hashtag for twitter). So much controversy, in fact, that Tom LaRock, current Board President, wrote an excellent blog post about building a bigger umbrella for Mike.  I applaud Tom for doing this; it’s a vision, and that’s a great thing to have.  However, I wanted to take this metaphor, and turn it on its side; if we need umbrellas, then who’s making it rain?  Let’s take a look at the pieces of the puzzle.

 

Community as Commodity

To figure out the rainmakers, we need to define what the value of the Professional Association for SQL Server is.  If you’re reading this post, I bet you can look in a mirror and figure it out.  It’s you.  Your passion, your excitement, your interest in connecting and learning about SQL Server is the commodity provided by the organization.  We (the community) have reached a certain maturity in our growth as a commodity; we recruit new members through our enthusiasm, and we contribute a lot of free material to the knowledge base for SQL Server.  At this point, it’s far easier to grow our ranks than it would be to start over.   

However, the question I would ask is: what do YOU get out of membership?  For most of us, it’s low-to-no cost training (most of which is provided by other community members).   The association provides a conduit to connect us.   The value to you increases when you grow. Exposure to new ideas, new topics, a deeper understanding of the technology you use; all of these are fuel for growth.  In short, as individuals, community members profit most from DEPTH of knowledge.

The more active you are in the community, the more likely you’ll be able to forage out valuable insight; how many of you are active in the Professional Association of SQL Server?   According to this tweet from the official twitter account, 11,305 people have active profiles with the organization.  While that’s not a great metric for monitoring knowledge seekers, it does provide some baseline of measure for people who care enough to change their profiles when prompted. 

 

Microsoft Needs A New Storm

The Professional Association for SQL Server was founded to build a community of database professionals with an interest in learning more about Microsoft SQL Server; the founding members of the organization were Microsoft and Computer Associates, who obviously saw the commodity in building a community of people excited about SQL Server.  The more knowledge about SQL Server in the wild, the more likely that software licenses and training will increase.  Giving away training and knowledge for a lost cost yields great dividends in the end.

This is not a bad thing at all; it’s exciting to have a vendor that gives away free stuff like training.  However, it appears that Microsoft is making a slight shift away from a focus on SQL Server.  What makes me think this?

  • It’s getting cloudy (boy, I could stretch this rain metaphor): software as a service (including SQL as a service) is a lot more profitable in the long run than software licensing.  By focusing more on cloud services (Azure), Microsoft is positioning itself as a low-to-no administration provider.  
  • Electricity (Power BIQuery): Microsoft is focusing pretty heavily on the presentation layer of traditional business intelligence, and touting how simple it is to access and analyze data from anywhere in Excel “databases”.  Who needs SQL Server when your data is drag-and-drop
  • The rebranding of SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse: Data warehouse sounds like a database; Analytics Platform System sounds sexier, implying that your data structures are irrelevant.  Focus on what you want to do, not how to do it.

The challenge that Microsoft faces is that is has access to a commodity of SQL Server enthusiasts who don’t exactly fit the model of software-as-a-service; those of us that are comfortable with SQL Server on premise haven’t exactly made the leap to the cloud.  Also, many DBA’s dabble in Excel; they’re not Analytics practitioners.  In short, Microsoft has Joe DBA, but is looking for Mike Rosoft (see what I did there?), the Business Analyst.  Mike uses Microsoft tools to do things with data, not necessarily databases.  The problem?  Mike doesn’t have a home.   In order to maximize profits, Microsoft needs to invest in the growth of a larger and more diverse commodity.  In short, Microsoft wants a BROADER audience, but they want them to be excited and passionate about their technology.

Rain Dancing With C&C

The Professional Association for SQL Server has been managed by Christianson & Company since 2007.  While the Professional Association for SQL Server Board of Directors is made up of community volunteers, C&C is a growing corporation with the traditional goal of any good for-profit company: to make money.  How does C&C make money? They grow and sell a commodity.  If the Professional Association for SQL Server grows as an organization, C&C’s management of a larger commodity increases in value.   As far as I can tell, the Professional Association for SQL Server is C&C’s only client that is managed in this way.

The community gets free/low-cost training; C&C helps manage that training while diverting the cost to other players (i.e., Microsoft and other sponsors).  If Microsoft is looking for a broader commodity, C&C will be most successful if they can serve that BROADER audience.   The Professional Association for SQL Server’s website claims to serve a membership of 100,000+; that number includes every email address that has ever been used to register for any form of training from the association, including SQLSaturday’s, 24HOP, and Summit.  Bigger numbers means increased value when trying to build a bigger umbrella.

Yet, this 100,000+ membership is rarely reflected in anything other than marketing material.  Only 11,305 of them are eligible to vote; less (1,570) actually voted in the last election.  5,000 members are estimated to attend Summit 2014.  Perhaps the biggest measure of activity is the number of attendees at SQLSaturdays (18,362).  Any way you slice it, it seems to me that the number of people that are actively seeking DEEPER interactions are far fewer than the BROAD spectrum presented as members.  Furthermore, it would seem that reaching more than 100,000 members is challenging; if only 11,000 members are active in the community, and they’re the ones recruiting new members, how do you keep growing?  You reach out to a different audience.

 

Summary

I feel like it’s important to understand the commercial aspect of community building.  In short:

  • Microsoft needs to reach a broader audience by shifting focus from databases to simply data;
  • Christianson & Company will be able to grow as a company if they can help the Professional Association for SQL Server grow as a commodity;
  • The community has reached critical mass; it’s far easier to add to our community than it would be to build a new one.
  • The association has reached several members of the community (100,000+); far fewer of them are active  (11,305).

Where am I going with this?  That’s coming up in my next post.  While I don’t deny the altruism in the decision by the Board of Directors to reach out to a broader audience, I also think we (the commodity) should understand the financial benefits of building a bigger umbrella.

#SQLPASS–Good people, bad behavior…

I’ve written and rewritten this post in my mind 100 times over the last couple of weeks, and I still don’t think it’s right.  However, I feel the need to speak up on the recent controversies brewing with the Professional Association for SQL Server’s BoD.  Frankly, as I’ve read most of the comments and discussions regarding the recent controversies (over the change in name, the election communication issues, and the password issues), my mind keeps wandering back to my time on the NomCom.

In 2010, when I served on the NomCom, I was excited to contribute to the electoral process; that excitement turned to panic and self-justification when I took a stance on the defensive side of a very unpopular decision.  I’m not trying to drag up a dead horse (mixed metaphor, I know), but I started out standing in a spot that I still believe is right:

The volunteers for the Professional Association of SQL Server serve with integrity.

Our volunteers act with best intentions, even when the outcomes of their decisions don’t sit well with the community at large.  However, we humans are often flawed in our fundamental attributions. When WE make a mistake, it’s because of the situation we are in; when somebody else makes a mistake, we tend to blame them.  We need to move past that, and start questioning decisions while empathizing with the people making those decisions.

In my case, feeling defensive as I read comments about “the NomCom’s lack of integrity” and conspiracy theories about the BoD influencing our decision, I moved from defending good people to defending a bad decision.  This is probably the first time that I’ve publically admitted this, but I believe that we in the NomCom made a mistake; I think that Steve Jones would have probably made a good Director.  Our intention was good, but something was flawed in our process.

However, this blog post is NOT about 2010; it’s about now.  I’ve watched as the Board of Directors continue to make bad decisions (IMO; separate blog forthcoming about decisions I think are bad ones), and some people have questioned their professionalism.  Others have expressed anger, while some suggest that we should put it all behind us and come together.  All of these responses are healthy as long as they separate the decisions made from the people making them, and that we figure out ways to make positive changes.  Good people make mistakes; good people talk about behaviors, and work to address them.

So, how do we work to address them?  The first step is admitting that there’s a problem, and it’s not the people.  Why am I convinced that it’s not the people?  Because every year we elect new people to the board, and every year there’s some fresh controversy brewing.  Changing who gets elected to the board doesn’t seem to seem to stimulate transparency or proactive communication with the community (two of the biggest issues with the Professional Association for SQL Server’s BoD).  In short, the system is not malleable enough to be influenced by good people.

I don’t really have a way to sum this post up; I wish I did.  All I know is that I’m inspired by the people who want change, and it saddens me that change seems to be stunted regardless of who gets elected.  Something’s gotta give at some point.

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Addendum: you may have noticed that I use the organization’s full legal name when referring to the Professional Association for SQL Server.  Think of it as my own (admittedly petty) response to the “we’re changing the name, but keeping our focus” decision.

What I Wished I’d Known Sooner As A DBA

Mike Walsh has put together an excellent topic for discussion, and I’ve read several responses to this; all of them are great, but most them are a little optimistic for my experiences.  I like to think that most of my friends and peers in the #sqlfamily are happy people, so it’s understandable that their guidance is gentle and well-intentioned.  Me? I’m happy.  I’m also pretty suspicious of other people, so without further ado, the 4 dark truths I wished I’d known sooner.

  1. Some people are out to get you.  Call it insecurity or good intentions gone bad, but some of your coworkers can’t take responsibility for their own actions and look to blame others.  If you’re moderately successful at your job, there’s probably at least one person that is jealous of your success and is looking for ways to bring you down.  Most people aren’t like this, and the trick is learning who’s a friend and who’s not.  Spend time with friends, and defend yourself against enemies.
  2. The best solution isn’t always the best solution.  Engineers love to SOLVE problems; we don’t just like to get close to an answer.  We want to beat it down.  Unfortunately, in the real world, perfect is the enemy of the good; solutions that are exhaustive and comprehensive on paper are usually time-sucks to implement. Don’t get so wed to a solution that you overlook the cost of implementation.
  3.  At some point, someone will judge your work and it won’t pass the bar.  It’s really easy to pick apart bad code from a vendor (or perhaps from your enemy from point 1 above); it’s hard to make that some sort of critical judgment about your own code.  However, if you’re not making mistakes today, then you’ve got nowhere to grow tomorrow.  Take it easy on other people, point out the flaws in a constructive fashion, and hope that somebody does the same to you someday.
  4. The customer isn’t always right, but they always think they are.  I’ve had customers argue with me for days about something that I could demonstrate was 100% wrong; it doesn’t matter, and at the end of the day the relationship with them as a customer was irreconcilable because of the argument rather than the initial facts.  I’m not saying that you should capitulate to every whim of the customer; however, it’s less important to be right than it is to build a relationship.  Relationships are built on truth and giving a little.  Compromise and move on (or decide that it is better to move apart).