Winner of the June SQL Aloha Contest
Question of the Month | July 1, 2010 | 5:11 pmThis month’s question of the month was:
What is your best advice for boosting index performance?
As usual, selecting the winning entry was difficult as there were many great tips, but this month’s winner is Robert Miller. Robert has won a US $50.00 Amazon.com gift certificate and a single license (including one year of support and upgrades) for HyperBac for SQL Server, worth US $994.00.
To check out his response, and the responses of the other entries, click here.
Thanks for everyone who participated in this month’s contest, and don’t forget to enter the July Question of the Month.
- Winner of the March SQL Aloha Contest
- Winner of the May SQL Aloha Contest
- Winner of the February SQL Aloha Contest
- Winner of the April SQL Aloha Contest
- Winner of the July Question of the Month
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I started my first job in the early ‘90s as a lab technician. There I was happened to work with computers, equipped with MS DOS, Lotus 123 and dBASE III+. The job was interesting and later enjoyed working with computers. Later I decided to move as a developer and joined a small company which was developing business software using Clipper.
In the late 90s we suddenly received a big project which expected a lot of user interaction and data. We had a technical geek in our company and he recommended us to use Visual Basic 5.0, SQL Server (6.0) and develop it on Windows NT 4.0. It was the very first time I started using these things. (In fact I heard the names of SQL Server and Windows NT through his mouth for the first time in my life.) The system had a high data load and performance was a critical factor.
This is the time I learned the language SQL and it fascinated me. In clipper we need to manually loop through the data to get an aggregated value and make decisions on what index to use etc. In SQL, we don’t have to worry about it. So gradually I started working with SQL along with clipper. I started learning about the execution plans and statistics (with the idea of doing something similar in clipper applications)
The next step of learning happened when we installed the software at client site. The Client didn’t have a system administrator/database administrator and didn’t even think about having one person. His expectation was us to give recommendation on operating system and any additional software needed. He wasn’t even interested in using the computers for any other purposes. We recommended the same configuration. Then we were asked to maintain all issues expect hardware issues. This is where I learned quite a lot about the backup process, DBCC commands etc.
Gradually we started developing more and more software systems for Windows operating system. VB 6 and SQL Server were the tools we found easy to work with. Over the period, we encountered another issue. Developers were concentrating more on delivering the functionality quickly and not concentrating much on performance. It started hurting a bit on delivered systems. Often we found that developers who came from procedural background struggle a bit to understand the relational and set based query approach. I started helping my team mates on the SQL (language area) and gradually I was asked to concentrate more on database design and performance of database systems. Still I was a developer, but concentrating more on data access and database tier.
Somewhere in 2002-2003 the company I was attached to got another contract where we faced to compare the databases frequently. We were forced to compare the structure and data from different databases/tables and it was an opportunity to use some online sites of my favor: SQLServerCentral.com is one of them. After exploring a couple of available tools I finally wrote my own procedures to compare structure and data. (I don’t think them as good as Red-Gate tools we get now, but they did a good job for my requirement). So I decided to share with online community. (They are available at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/30221/ and http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/30458/). These scripts gave me a lot of recognition and I was encouraged to concentrate more on SQL Server.
After a couple of years, I heard that a big software developing company is looking for a full time development DBA. I felt that this job is more aligned to my passion and experience and I applied for it. After a couple of interviews I was selected and officially I became a DBA.
Some people thought I was making a mistake to leave from a comfortable top technical position and move into a new area. Looking back I am satisfied with what I have learned in the new role, and contributed something more to the society as DBA than a developer.