{"id":921,"date":"2009-03-15T20:19:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-15T20:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blogs\/paul\/post\/Things-you-know-now.aspx"},"modified":"2017-04-13T09:54:10","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T16:54:10","slug":"things-you-know-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/things-you-know-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Things you know now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">There&#39;s a long-running discussion with people tagging each other to post advice for people new to SQL Server, about what they know now and wished they&#39;d known ealier in their lives\/careers &#8211; lot&#39;s of SQL MVPs and other luminaries have been doing it and I&#39;ve been tagged now by my good friend Ward Pond &#8211; <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.technet.com\/b\/wardpond\/archive\/2009\/03\/15\/what-i-know-now-ward-s-epistle-to-the-n00bs.aspx\"><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">here&#39;s his entry<\/font><\/a><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">The idea is to give two pieces of advice to help people out. My two came to mind almost instantly.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">The first is a tenet I live by &#8211; <em>there&#39;s no fate but what you make.<\/em> It&#39;s actually a quote from the Terminator 2 movie and it basically means that nothing happens to you unless you make it, and you&#39;re responsible for your own life. This applies equally to life and to your career.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">If you&#39;re not in an optimal place in your life for whatever reason (happiness, job, city, partner), then it&#39;s up to you to change it. And you should have the confidence to try. Sometimes you might try and fail, but at least you can say to yourself that you&#39;ve tried. I&#39;ve changed jobs, cities, and partners a few times each and (luckily for me) it always worked out. Sometimes the change was hard to make, sometimes it wasn&#39;t. But I knew it was up to me if I wanted a change so I had no choice but to make it happen or adapt to the current situation.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">For your career, and this is where I&#39;m touching on SQL Server, there are some situations that you may get into that are entirely of your own creation. Someone breaks into your server because you didn&#39;t check security. The company goes under because the sales database was lost and you didn&#39;t provision backups. You get a bonus because you tuned the indexing strategy so performance could handle the big sales weekend. Whatever. I believe that everything that happens to you is from your own making (apart from &#39;random&#39; things like car accidents). You may say that something happened in your job that you had no control over &#8211; but you took that job&#8230; It&#39;s an interesting way to look at life, but that&#39;s what I know now.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">The second thing is purely about SQL Server. If you&#39;re a DBA, some day in your career you will encounter database corruption and you will be responsible for clearing it up. Don&#39;t stick&nbsp;your head in the sand and fool yourself that it won&#39;t happen to you. It will. Be prepared. Take backups. Check your backups. Come up with an HA strategy. Practice restoring. And so on. I&#39;ve been involved in hundreds, maybe more than a thousand, of corruption cases while at Microsoft and beyond. The over-riding take-away for me from that (ongoing) experience? People are unprepared and don&#39;t know what to do. That&#39;s what I know now.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">I hope these are helpful and I&#39;ve fulfilled my obligation.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">I hereby tag: <\/font><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">Greg Linwood<\/font><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">, <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/statisticsio.com\/\"><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">Jason Massie<\/font><\/a><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">, and <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/bobb\/\"><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">Bob Beauchemin<\/font><\/a><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font size=\"2\">PS Kimberly was tagged &#8211; her post is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/kimberly\/things-i-know-now\/\">here<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#39;s a long-running discussion with people tagging each other to post advice for people new to SQL Server, about what they know now and wished they&#39;d known ealier in their lives\/careers &#8211; lot&#39;s of SQL MVPs and other luminaries have been doing it and I&#39;ve been tagged now by my good friend Ward Pond &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Things you know now - Paul S. 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