November 22, 2011 at 1:55 am
Thanks Craig.
Love the bit about criminal bosses. Have to find one now.
Seriously, thanks for taking the time, I will go through the article and try and use your suggestions.
November 22, 2011 at 11:32 am
peterob1 (11/22/2011)
Thanks Craig.Love the bit about criminal bosses. Have to find one now.
Seriously, thanks for taking the time, I will go through the article and try and use your suggestions.
My pleasure. Comments like that are the exact reason I did it. I hope it will serve you well. 🙂
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
For better assistance in answering your questions[/url] | Forum Netiquette
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November 22, 2011 at 11:48 am
Ninja's_RGR'us (11/21/2011)
Bill Hansen (11/20/2011)
You may also consider certification as one way to demonstrate knowledge and give you a slight edge.Many posters here conduct interviews and while it's not a deterant on your resume, it's not, by itself, going to get you the job if you can't prove your knowledge in the interview.
I do agree but having certifications will put you on top of all non-certified entry level postulants. A certification shows that at least the postulant is serious enough to invest treasure and time, they may help to get into the interview room.
_____________________________________
Pablo (Paul) Berzukov
Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.
Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.November 22, 2011 at 12:37 pm
There has been lots of very good advice already posted. Craig's article is one of the best I've seen on the subject.
One of the main points you have to get is don't be intimidated by the job requirements. Like Craig, I've seen many postings looking for 10 years experience with SQL 2005 and 2008 - I guess they couldn't do the math. What I've found is that usually there are a couple of points in the requirements that the company really needs and the others could be learned rapidly by a quick learner and they would be very satisfied.
I interviewed with a company where the requirements were:
1. 10 Years experience with SQL 2005 and 2008 (yes - they did post that).
2. Expert with the tuning advisor (ouch! DTA is not a very good tool for really tuning queries)
3. Expert with database mirroring and replication.
4. Disaster recovery expert.
5. Expert at indexing, user defined functions, database views, etc.
6. Expert at writing complex stored procedures.
7. Strong XML skills
What they really needed was someone who could write some stored procedures and views that performed well. I'm nowhere near an expert at disaster recovery. I know how to back up a database, do log backups and restore them. I've never worked on a system that had mirroring and only 2 where they actually used replication (although I didn't do anything with the replication myself). The XML part was really that a small part of the overall system imported some XML data - hardly needing an expert.
I did have to demonstrate that I know how to properly tune a query, that I know indexing, etc.
When I showed them what I could do and do well, they were perfectly happy to give me a contract to design and develop some new features. There were other people already handling the mirroring and they actually didn't have replication going.
So take the job requirements with a grain of salt. Sometimes they really need a complete guru, but most often they really don't.
About the biggest bang for the buck you could study would be Gail Shaw's articles on handling performance problems and indexing. You should have a good methodology for handling this type of thing. All companies want a system that performs well.
Todd Fifield
November 22, 2011 at 1:02 pm
tfifield (11/22/2011)
There has been lots of very good advice already posted. Craig's article is one of the best I've seen on the subject.One of the main points you have to get is don't be intimidated by the job requirements. Like Craig, I've seen many postings looking for 10 years experience with SQL 2005 and 2008 - I guess they couldn't do the math.
...
Todd Fifield
Thanks Todd, I think you were thinking of this article from me though, though probably helpful here too, thanks for reminding me:
Do I really have to be the SQL God?[/url]
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
For better assistance in answering your questions[/url] | Forum Netiquette
For index/tuning help, follow these directions.[/url] |Tally Tables[/url]
Twitter: @AnyWayDBA
November 22, 2011 at 3:32 pm
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