Happy New Year!

Hope you all had a good Xmas, ate too much, drank too much and are still telling yourselves that this year you will stick to your New Year’s resolutions (ha).

I didn’t blog in December because…I moved to Ireland to start a new job. I’ve always wanted to work abroad and for a Brit, working in Ireland is like abroad lite. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of differences between Britain and Ireland but there are similarities which I find comforting (being able to get the same TV channels is a big one).

I’ve been in a hotel for the last several weeks whilst I removed all my furniture from my old flat in England (which I’ve geekily referred to as decommissioning) and whilst I searched for a new one in Ireland. But I’ve got a flat now so can start to relax a little bit on the personal front and start to concentrate on my new position.

I don’t want to blog about my new position or the company that I’m working for but I do want to talk about how I approach a new position in general. DBAs have a tendency to want to change things immediately when starting a new job, for example implementing their own backup and maintenance procedures.

In the past I have spent most of the first couple of weeks reviewing the environments in a new position, mainly to familiarise myself with them but also to make any notes for any changes I am going to recommend. After that I’ll speak to the incumbent DBA about any recommendations I have and go from there. For example, I like to disable the SA login but there may be apps that have been setup to use that account so simply disabling it may not be an option.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not a good idea to go into a new job “all guns blazing”, wanting to make radical changes immediately. This can be difficult for me and I have had to restrain myself in the past but all it will do (at best) is make people think, “Who does this guy think he is?”

Introducing changes slowly with sound evidence for the reasons behind them will not put anyone’s nose out of joint and will also get your new colleagues to respect the knowledge that you are bringing to the table.