What are the tools you love to use? What are the tools that maybe need a little sharpening? What tools do you have that maybe you wish were the same caliber as somebody else’s 
tools? And lastly, which tools do you not possess that you wish you possessed?
This are maybe some of the questions that Jens Vestergaard (b | t) would like for us to examine as we take an introspective look into our tool belts this month for the 101st installment of TSQL Tuesday.
If you are interested in reading the original invite, you can find that here.
“Besides SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio Data Tools we all have our own set of tools that we use for everyday chores and tasks. But how do we get to know which tools are out there, if not for other professionals telling us about them? Does it have to a fully fledged with certification and all? Certainly not! If there’s some github project out there, that is helping you be double as productive, let us know about it. You can even boast about something you’ve built yourself – if you think others will benefit from using it.”
That is the invite. I am going to not adhere very closely to that invite. You see, I take a rather open ended definition to the meaning of “tools” this time around. You see, there are many general tools that just about everybody will use. But what about the tools that help to refine your abilities as a DBA?
Brief Intermission
A shout out is absolutely necessary for Adam Machanic (twitter)for picking the right blog meme that has been able to survive so long in the SQLFamily. This party has helped many people figure out fresh topics as well as enabled them to continue to learn.
Refinery
There are two tools I would like to throw out there as essential to the DBA tool belt. These are not your traditional tools by any means but they are easily some of the most essential tools you could employ in your trade craft. These tools are Google-FU and blogging.
Yes, I am taking a liberal definition to the term “tools” and I warned you of that already. These are seriously some of the most important tools anybody could acquire. These are the tools that allow you to sharpen your skills and become an overall better professional. Let’s start with google-fu.
Google-fu is the ability to employ internet searches to find answers to your current questions as well as your current problems. 15 years ago, this skill was much more difficult to acquire and frankly quite a bit more important. In the present world, algorithms are running in the background and profiling you to help you find the answer you are looking for a little more easily. You do more searches, Google learns you better and you get better more accurate results over time. This is a good thing. Every data professional should be able to employ a good Google search to find the appropriate answers to their current problems.
Blogging on the other hand also gets easier over time but for different reasons. Where Google has evolved to help you improve your google-fu, the only way for you to improve your blogging ability is through more and more practice.
Why is blogging so important? Blogging is not there just to help you become a better writer. That is a nice benefit because every data professional needs to be able to write to some extent depending on business needs, requirements, documentation etc. Blogging helps you become a better technical person.
What is often overlooked about blogging is that it requires the writer (if they truly care), to research, practice, and test what it is they happen to be writing about. Why do people do this when blogging? Well, the truth is simple. You are putting a piece of yourself out there for public consumption and people will nitpick it. You will want to be as accurate as possible with whatever you put out there for the world to see. This also becomes a bit of your resume and future employers may see it. You will want them to see your value and not something littered with mistakes.
Over time, your writing will also tend to serve as a personal knowledge base. How cool is that? You will forget the fixes for things over time. You will forget some of the cool solutions over time. That is natural. If you have it written somewhere, you will be able to find it and use it again and again.
The Wrap
These are a couple of the tools that I highly recommend for all data professionals. Sure they are non-traditional tools, but that does not diminish their importance. I recommend you try to polish these particular tools as frequently as plausible.
Oh, and if you are interested in some other SQL Server specific tools, read this series I have published.