Denis Gobo

How I got started in IT

I was tagged by Brent Ozar in his post Starting the SQL Journey where he talked about how he got started as a SQL DBA.  So here’s my story, in all its glory. Continued »

My First Computer

I was tagged by Denis Gobo in his post What was your first computer….

My first PC was some Texas Instruments unit my dad bought.  It was pretty much a word processor, I don’t even remember if it had any games.  It hooked up to the TV like many units of the day.  We had a printer for it, so we must have had some sort of expansion slot for it.  I think we had the tape player for it as well.

Our first actual PC was an IBM 8080 cloan (the precursor to the 8086 that gave birth to the x86 line).  My parents spent a fortune on it.  It was upgraded to 640k of RAM, a single sided single density floppy drive (so 120k of data or something).  It had a 20 Meg hard drive and a 16 color VGA video card (I used the monitor for like 18 years before I got rid of it).  It came with DOS 3 something on it, and we kept it up through 6.2 I think.  File Manager for DOS was the best addition at the time.

I remember that we had a three button Logitech track ball that was rectangular.  I used that from the time I was 6 until I was 20 when I finely had to replace it (the monitor outlasted the trackball).

I remember that my dad bought be some programming kit for it when I was 8 or 9.  Probably VB for DOS or something like that.  It came with a bunch of games that you could tweak the code of and play.  I remember spending months making my own Brick Breaker levels (they called it something else) and playing them over and over.

The coolest upgrade my dad got for the machine was the modem and a Prodigy account.  I wasted who knows how many hours playing the games that Prodigy offered over a 300 bps external modem.

Since I’ve now told my story its time for some others to tell theirs.  Time to tag a couple of people I don’t normally.

T Jay Belt (@tjaybelt on Twitter)
Woody Pewitt (@woodyp on Twitter)

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

I was bouncing around the net, and found Wordle.net

Wordle.net creates word maps of all the words on a website.  So I fed it my blog and came up with this.

I thought it was kind of cool, so I posted it up here.  Try out our site and see what it does.

In the true spirit of twitter I’ll pick on a couple of people to generate there own and post them (as soon as twitter comes back up, it’s DOA at the moment).

Denis Gobo, and Michelle Ufford you’ve been tagged

Denny

JournalSpace.com Says the site was trashed by the IT guy

The owner of JournalSpace.com has posted an update to the site (screen shot for posterity) giving more information about what happened.

Apparently the IT guy who liked to tell people how smart he was decided to rely on RAID as a backup for the database, but had automated backups of the web servers.  He was apparently caught steeling from the company and wiped out the SQL database on his way out the door.

Apparently my suspicions were correct and it wasn’t a system problem, but a person who deleted the data.

Andrew Hart posted a note on how some of the users are able to get there data back using the Google cache.  I tried using the Internet Wayback Machine but apparently JournalSpace.com was set to not allow it to be archived.

I would recommend to the owner of the site that the contact the local police department and file a report.  While company employees can’t be held liable for stupidity, intentionally destroying the company we can be held liable for.

Denis Gobo posted an update as well, as I’m sure others did as well.

Denny

UPDATE: I forgot to include that I’m following the JournalSpace.com user on twitter so that I can keep abreast of new updates.

SECOND UPDATE: My horrible spelling was pointed out to me, so I’ve corrected this. Apparently Firefox didn’t pickup the spelling problems the first time around.

New Years Resolutions for 2009

I’ve been tagged by Denis Gobo for a New Years Resolution post.  I’ve only got a couple of things to put, since I’m not a big fan of New Years resolutions.

Upgrade our production systems to SQL Server 2008
I’ve been speaking about SQL Server 2008 since before it was released.  It would probably be nice if I actually upgraded our production systems at the office.  It’s just a matter of time to actually get it done.

Get started writing a SQL book of my own
In 2008 I wrote a few chapters for a couple of books for other people.  In 2009 I’ll attempt to write my own.

I’ll tag Jason Massie and Tom Larock.

Denny

sp_replwritetovarbin Heap Overflow Code Exploit Code In The Wild, Works By Using Our Good Friend SQL Injection

For those living under a rock there is a new SQL exploit in the wild.

Dennis did an excellent write up of it already so I’ll refer you do <. for his entry and save myself the time of writing what has already been written.

Denny

SQL Quiz: Toughest Challenges

Chris Shaw posted a new SQL Quiz where he asks: “What are the largest challenges that you have faced in your career and how did you overcome those?”

I found this question rather tough to answer (as I have when I’ve been asked similar questions during interviews), but here goes.

1:  Dealing with some of the developers that I’ve had to work with in the past.

Most of the people that I’ve worked with in the past have been great.  But there are a few out there (who will rename nameless since the IT field is a pretty small group) that were just a major pain.  Never open to anyone’s ideas but their own.  No project is important unless it is their project.  Unfortunately at the time this was the CEO’s favorite employee since he was the one that had gotten the company that far.  It didn’t matter that a new group of people had been brought in to help get the company to the next level.

As far as dealing with the problem, we eventually went to our boss and basically told her that someone needed to bring him back down to earth.  There were other good ideas that deserved consideration and as the infrastructure team we should be listened to at least once in a while since we might know what we are doing.

2: Same company, a year later having to work with (and for) people that didn’t understand half the stuff coming out of my mouth.

After butting my head against statements like “a Table and a worksheet mean the same thing” I took the easy way out.  I just had to, I gave notice and left.  It took me several months of biting my tongue and explaining myself over and over before I had finely had enough.  I ended up moving on to another company which ended up laying me off after 6-8 weeks because they ran out of money.  But all in all it was a good choice.

(I’ll put up a third answer, but only because I’m cheating and stealing Brent’s second answer.)

3: Learning when to tell people “No”.

I love telling people yes.  Sure I can add that functionally.  Stay late and get that done; no problem.  Eventually people start taking advantage of you and planning on you being able to be taken advantage of.  My wife (Kris) helped a lot on helping me fix this one (I still have a hard time telling her no, but that’s something else to work on) and I thank her for that.

Brent Ozar  (brento on Twitter) tagged me for this one.

I’m tagging:

Denis Gobo (DenisGobo on twitter)

Tom Larock (sqlbatman on twitter)

Denny