Colin Stasiuk

Making SSMS Beep

Today I read a post from my good friend Colin Stasiuk (aka @BenchmarkIT) where he talked about making SSMS beep when a query has completed.

I didn’t know this was such a well guarded secret.  Which leads me to a story to share.  I had a supervisor (Ed) back at EarthLink who made it a point to have story time during his pre-shift meetings, those were the best days to be working.  I remember that Ed was on vacation once and our assistant supervisor Dennis was running the team.  Well instead of telling us a story, he brought in a kids picture book to read to us.  It was awesome, there were about 80-90 tech support reps all sitting in the break room hanging on every word from a book for 2 year olds.  Funniest sight ever.

But that’s a whole different story than the one I wanted to share.

One one particularly long night at EarthLink, back in 2001 or so (I was using SQL 2000 at the time), I had a lot of database data changes to make (I have no idea why at this point).  Probably business rules had changes so data needed to be changed, and indexes needed to be changed, or something.  Needless to say SQL was going to be running queries all night long.

Well, having already worked 12-16 hours that day, I didn’t really want to stay up all night watching SQL run.  So I cranked up the speakers on the PC as load as they would go (I had some nice speakers so they got loud), and set Windows to as load as it would go (I’m a heavy sleeper) and started the first of the T/SQL Scripts.  I promptly curled up on the floor with my pillow and blanket that I had brought in and went to sleep.  About three hours later I was woken up by the loudest “Windows ping” ever.  It really scared the crap out of me, but it did the job.  I checked what ever it was that needed checked and started the next script.

This happened probably three or four times through out the night.  The next morning I took a shower (we had showers on site for just such nights), and changed my clothes (my wife was kind enough to bring me a change of clothes before she went to bed) and went on with my new work day, after technically pulling an all nighter that I slept through about 99% of.

If only all, all nighters were that easy.

Denny

Things You Know Now…

It’s my turn for the Things You Know Now post thanks to Colin Stasiuk.  The basic question asked at the beginning of the thread of posts is “What do you wish you knew when you started?”.  Here are my answers.

1. People don’t like being shown up.

This was an issue for me mostly at the first IT job when I worked at Earthlink.  While I had an IT job, and an IT function I didn’t work for the IT or MIS departments, I actually worked for the Customer Support department.  This gave me some advantages and some disadvantages.  The biggest advantage to getting things done for my customers was that I didn’t work in IT, so I didn’t have to follow the strict IT guidelines for getting stuff done.  The downside was that I didn’t have the support or respect of pretty much anyone in the IT department for the company.  On more than one occasion my customers would follow proper procedures and ask the IT group to build something, and they would get a crazy long time line like 12-18 months.  Then they would come to my group and we’d give them a time line of 3 weeks, and we would deliver on that date.  Needless to say the IT development teams didn’t like this very much at all, and in the long run it didn’t help me out very much when it came time for layoffs.

2. Knowing everything isn’t the key

When working in IT, knowing everything about every topic isn’t the most important thing.  When I started in IT I tried to learn everything, and I mean everything.  And while knowing at lot is important, knowing everything isn’t.  The only time that you have to work in a vacuum is when you are at a job interview, other than that you have access to Google, Books, MSDN, etc and you can easily look information up if you don’t know it.  I feel that while knowing a lot is important, knowing how to find the information is just as important.

3.  User Groups are a great place to get information, and meet other admins

When I first started in IT (and for several years after that) I didn’t know about user groups.  I wish that I had, because I haven’t known a whole lot of DBAs over my carrier until recently.  I think it would have been great to know more DBAs earlier in my carrier, as well as get more information first hand from local senior level people.  Recently I’ve been speaking at a lot of user groups and I’ve met a lot of great people at the meetings.

I’ll pass the fun onto a few friends (which as far as I know haven’t been tagged yet).

Denis Gobo (@DenisGobo on Twitter)
Michael Deputy (@MichaelDep on Twitter)

Denny