Number 10? I only just finished Dirty Dozen #1. What’s going on here, then?

Well, no one said I had to write them in any particular order! But, if you look at the posters, they are clearly numbered. Should someone else pick up the Dirty Dozen challenge, it will help them to see which ones I’ve covered already if I use the numbers in the titles.

Besides, I particularly wanted to address the impact of stress in a DBA’s life because I’ve had some extremely relevant recent experience.

The most difficult aspect of my first few months at Pythian has been my elevated stress levels. I don’t usually get stressed out about much, particularly my work, which I feel I control. It does happen, though, and I can recall a few stressful times in the past when I was working in a busy front-line support role for another company, so it’s not limited to my time at Pythian.

Frankly, it would be an unusual DBA support role that was stress-free, and a little stress is part of the fun. One day you’re going to have to recover a production database (and fast!) so it goes with the territory. However, a combination of several new customer environments; working alone at home in a different timezone to most of my colleagues; and such a wide variety of tasks, is a little different to what I’ve been used to. My own guess is that an accumulation of common stress factors has made it more stressful than past roles.

The poster describes several strategies to avoid stress becoming a problem and I’ll go through some of those, relating them to my recent experiences.

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As promised, here is the first part of the series based on the MARSS posters — The Dirty Dozen — concerning the importance of clear communication between DBAs.

The best DBAs have great communication skills. I don’t mean that they write books, present at conferences, or can order a meal in six languages. DBAs do need to be able to communicate in different tones and at different levels of detail because they’re likely to be communicating with diverse interest groups such as end users, hardware vendors, system administrators, business leaders, Oracle Support analysts — well, it’s a long list. However, like the MARSS poster, I’m going to focus on communication with our peers — other DBAs. That demands the ability to communicate a small but sufficient subset of relevant information as clearly as possible.

That’s even more important when you are working in a geographically-distributed team of DBAs within a 24-hour “follow-the-sun” model. Pythian is the second organisation where I’ve worked this way, and, although the two companies take slightly different approaches, the challenges are similar and particular communication techniques are fundamental to the smooth working of both.

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Here’s the challenge.

How do I post to both work and personal blogs and provide appropriate material for both? It’s not a problem I expected to face because most employers, at least where I’m from, wouldn’t entertain the idea of employees blogging on company time to the company blog, far less encourage it. Which is one of several reasons that I found myself choosing to work with Pythian.

I thought about this quite a bit during January evenings (although Cary Millsap might have preferred me to spend a bit more time writing about Parallel Execution!), and Paul Vallée and I have discussed it on and off. Do the technical blogs belong here, because they crop up during work? That would be a bit of a disaster, given the already dangerously low level of technical content on my own blog. Besides, Pythian is full of smart young people who do that so much better than I do (and yes, even my team lead and the CEO count as young when you’re my age!). Then again, I can’t just blog about cuddly toys here. Actually, if I had a good enough argument, I bet I could swing it, but I don’t.

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