Today we have a guest editorial from Grant Fritchey as Steve is away on his sabbatical.

I like to crack the joke that I’m a DBA, which means I’m a paranoid, control freak. The universe is out to get my data. Don’t believe me? Look up extra-solar radiation. Yes, as we travel through the universe, we occasionally hit patches of higher radiation. Now, look up the effects of radiation on disk storage. That’s right, depending on your shielding, you could get disk corruption as the Earth travels through the universe.

Now that you’ve joined in my paranoid cult, I hope you enjoy the cookies.

Seriously though, one of the harder things to do, especially as a DBA, is to surrender control. After all, the more things we control, the fewer things that can go wrong. Right? Well, actually, the more we try to control every single aspect of every single system, the more we become a bottleneck that stifles innovation and change. One of the most important lessons we can learn, as IT professionals, is to surrender, just a little. Find those places where automation will do a better job than we can do manually. Track down those spots where delegation means a faster process because we have more hands that can do the job. Identify the places where our process can be trusted, so our Mark I eyeball doesn’t have to be the only thing standing between success and disaster. Surrender, just a little.

Find the right places and stop trying to control them. This will free up time and effort for you to do more in the areas that matter the most. You’ll become less of a bottleneck and more of an enabler.