Posts Categorized: Non-Tech Articles
Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another very informative day.Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA. Keep reading.
Last week brought great news to Pythian – one of our DBAs in Pakistan, Fahd Mirza, has become an Oracle ACE. Fahd joined Pythian in September 2010 as the very first Pythian employee in Pakistan and thanks to his skills and ambitions ended up on the team supporting Exadata environments. I should also mention that another Oracle ACE DBA joined us recently – Jared Still. Jared is a well respected member of Oracle community, member of the OakTable Network and a veteran of the Oracle-L mailing list
The days are cold and wet. The nights are long and dark and full of beeping pagers. It is time to look back and reflect on the past year and plan for next year.
Pythian, a cluster of passionate DBAs, gives freedom to their DBAs to act. Here, with many companies, and with many databases of a different nature with varying requirements the DBAs are kept on fire. DBAs find reasons to come to their job every day, and when they do and learn new things every day, they rise to new heights. With new heights comes sense of achievements which generates happiness and when the DBAs are happy, databases under them touch new heights of mirth and perform beautifully. That is what Pythian is all about in my opinion.
North California Oracle User Group are planning their 2011 conferences and are looking for good presentations! We are a very friendly local user group, so if you live in NorCal and never presented before – this is a great place to start! We love seeing new presenters and we even have a public speaking expert on our board who loves giving feedback when requested. Of course, we are nice to seasoned gurus too.
The highlight of Monday night was Doug Burns shaving ceremony and finalizing it at Tap & Spile. I have captured some videos but they need some post-processing before I can publish them. Another highlight was watching photos of previous UKOUG conferences I attended.
Who from Pythian are at the UKOUG conference this year? In additional to myself, it’s Christo Kutrovsky, Daniel Fink, Paul Vallee and Andrew Poodle. Christo, Dan and myself are presenting, Andrew is helping organization of MySQL track as a MySQL SIG Chair and Paul… well, I’d say Paul is a slacker so he is covering the beer tap to pay up! :) It’s close to 2am – gotta get some sleep before tomorrow.
I give a lot of thought of what makes a DBA awesome as remote DBA, or a consultant. Based on my experience as a in-house DBA working with consultants we hired, on my experience as remote DBA for Pythian and on my observation of the amazing guys working for Pythian Consulting. Here’s the secret: You need to give the customer a warm fuzzy feeling. Here’s what I consider key parts of being effective at giving customers warm fuzzy feelings. Obviously all this applies in addition to being a very proficient technical problem solver.
MOTS is over and tomorrow morning I’m flying back home to OOW. This was my first conference where I presented as a Pythian employee. Its been a good experience. People would ask me who I work for, and when I answer “Pythian”, their eyes would light up, and they’d say something like “Wow! So, what’s it really like working for them?”. I never got this reaction when I worked for HP.
I’ve spent over a decade managing various production systems. After spending so much time with systems that are mostly not working as they should, one develops certain outlook on life. Like the deep belief that the only way to keep civilization functioning is by taking backups and testing them. Recently I had few discussions with developers, and it turned out that ideas that I consider trivial can be viewed as deeply insightful by someone with different experience.
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