Personal Archives - Page 2 of 2 - John McCormack DBA

Why I would like to be mentored

12th August 2020 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Who wouldn’t want to be mentored?

This blog post is created as a direct result of Paul Randal’s offer to mentor people in the SQL Server community. I’ve had a good think about it and it seems obvious to me. Paul asks “Why would I like to be mentored?” I’m going to set out my personal reasons and although this isn’t one of them, my immediate response is “Who wouldn’t want to be mentored?” If you don’t have a big ego and understand that some people know a lot more than you, and have been in the game for longer, it stands to reason that some mentorship could be of a huge personal benefit.

My reasons

I was a late-ish bloomer in tech. I had a different career from ages 16 – 32 so I always felt like I was playing catch up when I started as a DBA. At 32, coming out of university, I landed a job with Monster who just happened to have a large DBA team in Glasgow. I was lucky. I had a senior colleague who was only a month older than me. When I saw how good he was and how much he knew, I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. But I was also inspired. He mentored me a lot over the 6 years I worked at Monster, as did others, and I benefited from that. I felt I was ready to move on to the next challenge and moved into contracting.

Contracting can pay more, it did for me but it can be a lonely game. You don’t always have the same team spirit that you feel as an employee and any choices about personal development are entirely yours. Sometimes, there is so much dazzling new tech that I don’t know what to learn next. I believe a mentor can help me get focussed. Some of my learning options include:

Focus more on public cloud vendors like AWS and Azure. (Not just relational databases).
Focus more on a specific area of SQL Server that causes people problems and become much better at it.
- Performance tuning
- HA/DR solutions
Improve my PowerShell competence
How to become a better trainer

I am also at a bit of a crossroads in terms of my career. I have the following choices and I don’t know what is best. I hope a mentor can talk me through the pros and cons of each option, and help me honestly evaluate how ready I am for each.

Start consulting (Do I have a niche?)
- Performance consulting
- Cloud migration consulting
- Cloud cost optimisation consulting
Continue contracting
Go back into full time employment but seek a senior position
Launch a service offering a remote DBA service
Develop and launch a remote healthcheck service to identify pain points
Focus on creating engaging online training content
- How to make money from training content but still benefiting the SQL community
- I’m already active in the SQL community, and that will continue whether I’m chosen or not; but I do think that the increased confidence that may come after being mentored by Paul will help me improve the quality and quantity of my content.
- Whether to design and deliver my own content or deliver Microsoft approved courses. (I recently achieved the MCT award but I’m don’t feel ready to deliver MS training yet)

So those are the main reasons that I think an experienced mentor like Paul Randal would be a huge benefit to me and I’d be delighted to be chosen.

A month in the life of a DBA contractor

8th February 2019 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

I left what I considered to be a great permanent job to become a DBA contractor in Glasgow. It was one where I could pick some of my own projects, work with new and interesting technology and work in a team which collaborated well, liked each other and were good at sharing knowledge.

My reasons for moving on were two-fold. First of all, I wanted some career progression and it unfortunately just wasn’t available in my permanent job. Secondly, I wanted to work more with SQL Server and Azure. My last job started out as a SQL DBA but as a lot of people in this line of work will know, the duties have evolved considerably over time. This is mostly due to large scale cloud adoption. In my case, my workplace started heavily using AWS along with other RDBMSs and data platforms. (RDS MySQL & Aurora, ElasticSearch, Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Glue and Athena). This gives you a lot to learn. Don’t get me wrong, I threw myself into learning about cloud solutions and I loved working with AWS (hopefully I will again) but as time went on, I was worried I would start to lose some SQL Server knowledge.

So what has the first month been like?

I have been working exclusively on the Microsoft Data Platform. At my first client, I’ve worked with SQL Server on-premises, SQL Server running on Azure VMs, Azure SQL DB, Azure Analysis Services and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

On-Premises

The on-prem SQL Servers are mostly for hosting the databases of legacy applications and 3rd party vendor products. Some of the versions are ‘rather old‘ although these instances actually give the business the fewest headaches. I’ve worked on decommissioning unused databases that were still online, server side traces and native backups.

Azure VMs running SQL Server (IaaS)

These host the databases that have the most active development work. I’ve looked at performance issues and SQL Server configurations to help improve performance. I’ve shared best practice with the team in terms of tempdb and helped to reduce the volume of unnecessary emails from servers. (You know the ones which someone set up years ago but never induce any action from the DBAs).

Azure Analysis Services (PaaS)

This was fun. I only did some basic configuration and permissions but as I’ve never used Analysis Services much over the years, it was cool to see what was involved.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Paas)

It was great to get my hands on tech like this. I spent time modernising their manual point and click refresh process with PowerShell. This was a bit of a learning curve but extremely rewarding. This process will make future refreshes much easier. (I’ll share the code once I’m confident it’s good, I’d still like a few more run-throughs before doing this). Next month, I’d like to try to implement a self service process for the developers that allows them to do their own refreshes, freeing up DBA time to work on more critical items.

Azure SQL DB (PaaS)

So far, I haven’t had to do too much with Azure SQL DB on this project. I’ve listed out the instances and instance types using PowerShell. My plan is to review if these are right sized or if efficiencies can be made and I’ll also make sure the alerting is set up correctly.

Plans for next month

I’d like to offer some in depth server health reviews and work with the developers to help them make their code run faster. There is a lot of blocking due to long running stored procedures and sub optimal code. Improving a few of the big hitters will make them much happier and will ease the strain on some of our servers – at least that’s the idea.

SQL Server Glasgow Meetup

14th December 2016 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

I had the pleasure of speaking at last night’s SQL Server Meetup in Glasgow. It was a fairly relaxed affair and I hope that the session was enjoyed by those who attended.

I presented “A guide to SQL Server Replication, how to fix it when it breaks and alternatives to replication“. The slides are pitched at a basic level and don’t dive too deep into replication but give an overview of the different types of replication plus the key replication components.

As promised, I have made the slides available for download.

I also enjoyed doing the replication demo which worked but the content of that is not set out in a step by step fashion so I’ll work on that and aim to share it as soon as I get the chance. I focused the demo on setting up transactional replication and the importance of scripting it out so it is repeatable. I also showed how to use Replication monitor, how to use tracer tokens & how to query the distribution database for errors. There’s more info on that in this blog post.

Thanks to all who attended and thanks to Robert French for hosting.

My route to achieving MCSE Data Platform

28th January 2016 By John McCormack 2 Comments

This is my first non technical blog. Rather, it is about career and personal development.

Why did I want to achieve MCSE Data Platform?

Well, at first I didn’t. It seemed like a million miles away from where I started. My initial goal was just to pass the 70-462 exam (Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases) as my boss had suggested it would be a good thing to learn. This was the first I had heard about Microsoft certifications. From there, with each subsequent exam pass, I just extended my goal to MCSA SQL Server 2012 and then MCSE Data Platform.

Timeline

I had set the target of passing 70-462 by the end of 2013 which would be just over 1 year as a DBA. The great thing about the certification is you can do the 70-461, 70-462 and 70-463 in any order. Since most of my limited knowledge was about Database Administration and the subject I needed to learn most about initially was also Database Administration, this was a no brainer.

[Read more…]

Who is John McCormack

21st January 2016 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

John McCormack profile

Hi. I’m John McCormack and I’ve been working professionally with SQL Server since 2012. I spent 6 years as a production DBA with Monster and now work as an DBA Contractor. I love working with SQL Server but also with other cloud solutions. It’s a job that I love and I’m constantly learning.

Prior to deciding I wanted to work with computers, I had a wide and varied career. I joined RBS and worked my way through various positions including mortgage adviser and finished up as a manager in a contact centre. I was always looking for other jobs and skipped through a few other sales and management jobs with British Gas, and T-Mobile/EE but I was ultimately looking for a change.

It was in 2008 that I decided a full change of direction was required and I managed to secure myself a place on a Web Development degree at UWS. I changed to evening/weekend work at T-Mobile and started the degree. At the time, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a web developer but I found I really enjoyed the database modules. It was upon hearing a talk from a Database Architect about various career routes in the database world that I knew I wanted to be a DBA. Fast forward 4 years and I had earned my degree and had landed a job with Monster.

Next steps

Landing my first database job as an associate DBA was only step 1. I knew that the next thing I had to do was learn, learn and learn more to become a competent DBA. Coming into IT 10 years later than I perhaps could have, I felt I had some catching up to do. To do this, I’ve learned from my colleagues, taken on challenges in work, studied for and gained MCSA in SQL Server 2012, then MCSE Data Platform. My next aim is to learn more topics about SQL Server in greater detail and to share my knowledge with the community as I go about. I’m have also achieved the AWS Cloud Practitioner and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate qualifications.

Personal life

I’m married to Julie Ann and have 2 great boys, Graham and Johnny. We live in Paisley, Scotland. When I’m not working, I enjoy high impact exercise classes such as Boxfit and Metafit.

You can follow me on twitter but I can’t promise I’ll only talk shop. I’ve been known to tweet quite a lot about football, in particular, Saint Mirren FC of whom I am a big fan.