Blog

September 30, 2015

Greg Thomas

Hiding behind the Busy Work

Your plate is full, there is a ton on it, so where do you start? With the menial garbage?  Yeah, go work on that first, go work on the stuff that is cluttering your plate and keeping you away from the good stuff… it’s work that’s on the periphery that is taking up space in your head and slowing you down. And it’s easy, it makes it look like you are working, but you are really not, you’re hiding – hiding from the work that matters, that will make an impact that will take you to the next stage. But it’s

September 28, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Flattened Table Pattern

Years ago I attended my very first technical conference, SqlPass.  I was only a DBA for a few months at the time and it was a very last minute adventure.  I would spend the next 3 days at this conference becoming inundated with all things SQL Server surrounded by peers who had been doing this for much longer (I had only been a DBA for 3 months). The only session I remember from that event was this guy (sorry don’t remember the name) who got up on stage and talked about this big project he did for this restaurant review site and

September 27, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Caring Call Centre?

I had to make a call about a month ago to an ISP when a site I was working on went down in the middle of the night with no warning.  My first fear was that all of our data had been deleted and I did not know anyone who had a backup. I called up the ISP and miraculously got someone on the phone and spoke with them.  At this point in time, my heart was racing, my anxiety levels were through the roof and I felt a large hammer precariously positioned over my head. Whilst on the phone,

September 24, 2015

Greg Thomas

It’s Always The Same People

It’s Always The Same PeopleGood. I hear this phrase a lot – “It’s always the same people stepping up, someone else needs to step up”.  Sometimes I am that person, sometimes I hear it said of others, each time I say the same thing… Good. Whether it’s for the love of what you are doing or the need to make it happen for others. Good. At the end of it all, those people are going to the ones that leapfrog, surpass, struggle and push because they were willing to go the extra mile to make something extraordinary happen – whether

September 23, 2015

Greg Thomas

Service Restarts Go Boom!

Want to throw a wrench into someone’s day?  Assign them a critical production bug. Everything they had planned for that day just went out the window as they now to try to identify, isolate and solve the problem.  Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not and the time it can take to resolve can go from an hour to the entire day. Want to throw a grenade into someone’s day?  Tell them they have to restart a service or reboot the system for this production bug to be resolved AFTER a change to data has been made. There is nothing that