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The Voice of the DBA
 

Am I Good At My Job?

I was talking with a friend recently about some of their co-workers. In this case, they were complaining that another person couldn't do some tasks that my friend considered relatively easy things. Deal with an unusual restore situation, write some PowerShell to reconfigure servers, build somewhat complex (to them) queries, etc. Things that my friend thinks most database people should be able to do after a year of experience.

However, my friend questioned whether they were evaluating co-workers appropriately. How can one tell? I might be able to tell if a coworker is better or worse at a task, but what's my frame of reference and my experience. I might think them not capable at things I do well. At the same time, I can be wowed by someone with more experience with a technology I don't know well, such as Azure Data Factory, but not really be able to judge if they're average or an expert.

I suspect most people think they're good at their jobs, or at least competent. They think they are earning their salary, and they likely are. However, that doesn't mean they are better than the average SQL developer (or DBA or C# dev, etc.). That's a different standard, and while most people in surveys think they are better than average, that's not how averages work. Half of us are below the average.

It can be hard to determine where you might relate to others in a skill level. I think this is one reason why we struggle to interview and hire well. It's just hard to determine what a senior person should do, and in a short Q&A period, determine if a candidate can do all the things we might ask them to do later. I think many people get good at a small number of things their organization asks them to do, but often aren't well rounded outside of those boundaries.

The people I've known in any business who excel are those who are always learning and improving themselves. Whether they're technologies, doctors, or chefs, they are looking to get better at their existing skills and regularly add new ones. That's a good outlook for life in general, and I would hope many of you adopt that attitude.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

 
 Featured Contents
SQLServerCentral Article

JQ - Tool for Querying JSON documents using the CLI

David.Poole from SQLServerCentral

Learn how you can query JSON data from a CLI to check it before importing the data into a database.

External Article

Query Exercise: Improving Cardinality Estimation

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

Your challenge for this week is to tune a query. Say Stack Overflow has a dashboard that shows the top-ranking users in their most popular location. It’s even got an index to support it

Blog Post

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Friday Flyway Tips–Navigating in Flyway Desktop

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

Flyway Desktop changed the navigation and a few people were surprised. I was as well, so I decided to do a short tip on the changes. This is part...

Blog Post

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Query Store: How to open multiple instances of the 'Tracked Queries' dashboard

Cláudio Silva from Cláudio Silva

At the beginning of this week, I shared how you can Search for queries with Query Store GUI .
Today I want to share something, Query Store related, that bugged...

Blog Post

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Darling Data SQL Server Stored Procs in Azure SQL Database

hellosqlkitty from SQLKitty

Erik Darling, founder of Darling Data, has created these fantastic stored procedures to query SQL Server more efficiently to get health, log, or performance information. I will go through...

The Definitive Guide to Azure Data Engineering: Modern ELT, DevOps, and Analytics on the Azure Cloud Platform

The Definitive Guide to Azure Data Engineering: Modern ELT, DevOps, and Analytics on the Azure Cloud Platform

Site Owners from SQLServerCentral

Build efficient and scalable batch and real-time data ingestion pipelines, DevOps continuous integration and deployment pipelines, and advanced analytics solutions on the Azure Data Platform. This book teaches you to design and implement robust data engineering solutions using Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, Azure SQL database, Stream Analytics, Cosmos database, and Data Lake Storage Gen2.

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Error_Severity()

What is returned by the second SELECT when this is run? 
SELECT 1/0
SELECT ERROR_SEVERITY()

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

The Default Variable String

What is returned by the second SELECT in this code in SQL Server 2022?

DECLARE @s VARCHAR;
SELECT @s = 'this is a test of a fairly long string'
SELECT @s

Answer: t

Explanation: Without specifying a length, the default length is 1. Ref: char and varchar - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/char-and-varchar-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16#remarks

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

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SQL Server 2022 - Development
Conditionally Selecting Rows within Union - Hello, I have a union where I need to select rows from the first query if the Car Status column is equal to "New". Otherwise, I need to select rows from the second query in the union which comes from a separate db and table if the Car Status column in the first query equals […]
Declare XMLNAMESPACES - Hello fellows, does anyone know how to format XMLNAMESPACE declaration so that its output is formatted specific way? ; WITH XMLNAMESPACES ( DEFAULT 'fsrv', 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' as xsi, 'fsrv PositionRec.xsd' as schemalocation, '30' as Version ) SELECT GETDATE() for XML PATH ('TestPath'), ROOT ('AcctFncl') /******************************************************************************************************* The output of the below script gives me namespaces declaration on […]
 

 

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