My Pluralsight course for new SQL Server DBAs
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
We live in amazing times.
I live in a small town. Horses and hay fields all over the place.
I run Dallas DBAs from my home office, providing income for my family, 2 employees and several awesome people that I sub-contract work out to when needed. One of them I’ve never met face-to-face.
The technology of today makes the dream work.
I have no servers here…just 3 laptops and 6 screens. All of my software comes from SaaS providers, such as Office 365 and Quickbooks Online.
All of this came together to allow me to help someone I will never meet help HIS customer solve an issue on their production system.
I took a 3 class series of online, live courses from Brent Ozar (b|t). Once a month in December, January and February. This was facilitated by GoToMeeting on Brent’s end, Slack for the attendees to communicate questions to Brent and chat with each other, and a high powered Virtual Machine I built in Microsoft Azure, just for running really heavy workloads.
During that class I got to know one or two of the attendees pretty well, from their questions, to their funny comments, etc. There were a few that I shared Direct Messages with in Slack. I looked some of them up on LinkedIn, because I might want to catch up with them in the future. Many of the same people were in all 3 of the same classes with me. By February, it was like seeing old friends that I’ve never actually seen.
Just this week, one of those attendees reached out to me asking if I had a few minutes to spare, which at that time I did (right in the middle of a VERY busy week). We got on a Zoom call, screen-shared into his system, where he had a VPN going to connect to his customer’s Azure SQL DB.
We did some troubleshooting, used some of the things we learned in class, eliminated some possible reasons and came away with some things to test to make performance faster.
Without the technology of today, there is a zero percent chance I would ever have (virtually) met Bob, connected on LinkedIn, and been able to help. Much less actually see the problem in action.
Read back through and look at all the pieces of tech and people that made this fairly simple interaction even possible. Laptops, stable internet, live online training, LinkedIn, Slack, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Azure.
We live in amazing times.
Thanks for reading!
