I am not a morning person. I’ve really tried but there’s something in me that just stops me from getting out of bed, even though I know I should.

I have friends who get up at 05:30 every day and for me, that’s the middle of the night!

It doesn’t really matter however, I’m a productive person…just not before 9am in the morning. I tend to do most of my personal work (blogging, writing/practicing presentations) in the evening so have always made time when I am most productive.

I’m also really lucky with my current position as the rest of my team is based in the US so there’s no point in me getting up early to work, as I’d completely miss their work day.

Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway (and I’m sticking to it).

What about you? I’d love to know if you’re a morning or evening person? Would be interesting to see the ratio for DBAs out there.

Have a good week!

I’m a Windows guy.

Kinda have had to be, given my profession as a SQL Server DBA. But recently I’ve become a bit discontent with Windows. Nothing out of the usual has contributed to this, just things like UAC, updates etc.

Now in the past, I’ve had to suck these annoyances up and deal with them. But the world (well Microsoft) has changed.

With the release of SQL Server Operations Studio, Visual Studio Code, and powershell available as a snap on Linux; I now have tools required to be a SQL Server DBA on multiple platforms. Even SQL Server itself runs on Linux! (Anyone else still getting over that?)

So last week I took the plunge and bought a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu.

I’ve dual booted with Ubuntu for years so have always had the fallback to Windows there (just in case) but I’ve always seemed to manage. This isn’t to say that my Linux skills are up to par, I have a huge learning curve ahead of me.

Alright, I’ll admit that there’s a bit of shiny tech syndrome going on here but I am really looking forward to using something other than Windows as my primary laptop.

I’ll write a post after a couple of weeks of using it, hopefully I won’t have reformatted and installed Windows 10 🙂

Have a good week!

This coming weekend (9th of June) is SQL Saturday Cork!

I’ve been really looking forward to this SQL Sat as there’s only one in Ireland each year. I’m not from Ireland but have been here for over 4 years now and the User Group in Dublin is where I first started speaking.

I won best lighting talk at SQL Saturday Dublin in 2016 and that pretty much convinced me that I could go on and present full length sessions. So I owe a lot to the event in Ireland and consider it my “home” event.

It’s the first time that the event has been held in Cork and it looks to be a cracker. The venue is at University College Cork and there’s a great line-up of speakers (myself included 🙂 )

There’s also two fantastic pre-cons on the Friday before: –

Move your database to the Cloud
by Jose Manuel Jurado & Roberto Cavalcanti

50 Things All SQL Server Developers Need to Know
by Kevin Kline

So if you’re based in Ireland (or even if you’re not) I highly recommend that you come for a weekend of fantastic SQL Server training.

Hope to see you there!

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m something of a stress head. I tend to worry about things and have, in the past, let it get the better of me.

But I feel that over the last few years I’ve managed to get a handle of dealing with stress. As a DBA, dealing with stressful situations comes as part of the job. I’ve had to deal with issues where a server has been down and I’ve had to deal with it (generally with a crowd of people surrounding my desk).

Over the years I’ve become pretty good at dealing with situations like that. I’ve learnt to focus on the issue at hand, tuning out all the noise to allow me to isolate, identify, and (eventually) rectify the issue.

However over the last couple of months I’ve had a couple of things to deal with, that I have to admit, stressed me out no end.

Firstly I started a new job, always somewhat stressful but added to that was the fact that I was evicted from my flat in Dublin.

(I should say that my landlord ended my tenancy as it was up for review before a new rent cycle started, I didn’t do anything to get evicted)

Now, this was a bigger problem that it normally would have been as my new job was my first remote working position.

So, yeah, I was pretty stressed.

The way I dealt with it was to take the same approach I do when dealing with issues at work. Focus on the tasks at hand and shut out all the other noise.

So each day, I had a list of things I needed to achieve. Search and book viewings for flats, email Estate Agents to register an interest in renting the property, provide the requested documents, and so forth.

By doing this, I managed to keep my levels of stress down as it felt I was working towards achieving my goal. Every task completed brought me onto the next allowing me to keep my focus.

And now, I’m writing this in my new flat looking forward to SQLBits later this week. 🙂

I’m not saying that this approach would work for anyone else but I thought I’d share what works for me.

Have a good week!