This month Shane asks us to reach into our “cookie jar” and pull out some life lessons. Thank you for an interesting topic to think and write about!
Shane also describes for us what this term means in our context:
Dipping into the Cookie Jar is about when the going gets tough and you don’t think you can handle anymore, then you think back about your accomplishments and take some sustenance from them. You dip back into that cookie jar and use whatever energy that provides to keep going.
https://nocolumnname.blog/2019/03/05/t-sql-tuesday-112-dipping-into-your-cookie-jar/
Starting very early in my career, I learned what trial by fire really meant. I had zero experience going into a role where I needed to learn database, system administration, programming, networking, and telecommunications all at once. I definitely came out from that role singed from that fire, but I came out a dedicated, curious, and honest individual with significantly more experience than where I started.
Very recently I was working on SQL Server upgrades and our deployment finished four hours past what we expected and it was an 18-hour shift following a 12-hour shift with a followup 10-hour shift. It was a very busy week with many huge victories, I couldn’t be more proud of the team of folks I’m working with. (This kind of schedule is not the norm, but as we all know in IT, sometimes a schedule variance like this is happens and it’s to be expected OCCASIONALLY. My team falls into the very rare occasional category here.)
I look back at my first role though and think about how I worked 60 hour weeks for a few months to keep up with the workload because I was also teaching myself the job at the same time. Or I look back when I had a 36-hour shift rebuilding the Exchange servers and on the phone with Microsoft support. Those weren’t even to secure big wins, those shifts were just to make the fire raging around me smaller.
This was a big win. It was painful, but it makes our lives better going forward and gives us momentum going forward. And all things considered, working 18 hours is not a big deal when you could be working 36 hours.
The other cookie jar I dip into is a compilation of resources I’ve accumulated over time. This comes in several forms from my Github, Stack Overflow, to my own website. Here’s what has helped me the most!
One cookie I didn’t expect to help as much as it has, is my script that disables all schedules that are enabled in SQL Agent. This effectively disables all SQL Agent jobs and then the 2nd script is available to re-enable them. If you need to disable all the jobs without disabling SQL Agent, it’s a pretty quick method.
I’ve also created a page that gives you a detailed view of articles in a preferred reading order along with a proof of concept to illustrate needs and problems you may face with Change Tracking. Having this in my toolbox has saved me a lot of time as this is a request I have had frequently. People are always needing to track the changes to their data.
From my github, I found these the most frequently used:
- Manually fixing broken
sids . - Dynamic loop to delete all records out of a DB. (Good if you want to rapid fire a delete in your tiny proof of concept DB or serves as an alright loop template.)
- List the metadata about all tables in a database.
- Basic backup and restore commands, handy so I don’t need to reference Books Online.
- Auditing Scripts, these give me detailed information about who can do what.