T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t). This month’s edition is hosted by Wayne Sheffield (b|t) who has asked us to tell a story about a time we ran into a Brick Wall.
So many walls, so few Bulldozers…
The largest brick walls I’ve ever run up against were not technical issues as you might expect…but people and processes.
Processes:
I was working for a company that bought a company that bought the company I had hired on with. The newest owner was growing their managed hosting business by buying others out. Not a bad approach when you have deep pockets. BUT, they never integrated any of them. Everything was still in its original silo. So, anytime I got a call or a ticket, I had to search through 4-5 knowledge base/Sharepoints, 2-3 password repositories and 4 ticketing systems. I could easily spend 2 hours to research and close a ticket that took 3 minutes to resolve on the technical side.
This place broke my flipper. As in, I no longer gave a flip after it took a full year to get all the access I needed to every environment. The Bulldozer here is that I got laid off. They gave me a big bag of money to leave and go do cool things with modern SQL versions for other places. YES!!
People:
I was asked to bill a crazy high rate for a full-time contract, to watch over a very small environment of 25 servers. I was asked to put in best practices, be the unofficial team lead, make things go faster, secure them, etc.
BUT…JimBob the Manager (clearly not his real name) gave me the brick wall at every turn. It took 6 weeks to get rid of NetBackup in favor of SQL Server Maintenance Plans. (I know…lets not go there.). Compressed backups? Made me prove it. Index maintenance? OK, but he wouldn’t let me schedule it. New indexes that actually made sense? No chance, as that was a code change to the application our Very Big Vendor had written for us. Within 3 months, I was down to 15 minutes of real work a day, and the rest spent blogging, Tweeting and answering questions on DBA.StackExchange.
The Bulldozer on this one was me walking out the door into cooler things. 33% pay cut was worth it, to save my sanity and go independent again!
Technology:
I don’t run into technical Brick Walls, because I know how to Tweet using #sqlhelp, as well as read blogs from people I trust in the #sqlCommunity, and Vendor docs.
Thanks for reading!
