I knew of Douglas McDowell prior to his running for the PASS Board of Directors last fall, but I never really knew him until we started working together on the board during the past seven months. One of the first things I learned is that the guy needs a nickname, so I am going with D-McD until someone comes up with something better.
The more I am able to spend time with D-McD the more I appreciate how he always has his finger on the pulse of our industry. He is able to see where we are and, more importantly, where we are going as database professionals. He is the type of person that the more you speak with him, the more you find out what he knows, and the more you want to speak with him so that you can find out more about what else he knows.
I had the opportunity last month to spend some time sitting and chatting with Douglas and I asked him if he wanted to take part in
SR: How long have you been a member of PASS?
D-McD:7 years – since TechEd during the summer of 2002 in Atlanta, a group of us met with PASS folks to plan the kickoff of the Atlanta PASS Chapter – we named the group Atlanta.mdf, short for Atlanta Microsoft Database Forum
SR: What positions have you held for PASS, and why did you want to serve on the Board of Directors?
D-McD: Of course I started out as user group leader in 2002 and continued there until I moved away from Atlanta in 2006. I served on the Chapter Committee from 2004 through 2007 and in 2006 I was one of the first Regional Mentors where I worked to network 18 PASS Chapters on the Eastern side of the US; I was Regional Mentor until mid-2008. And then I ran for the PASS Board in the fall of 2008.
I did not have enough to do with all my free time and I heard that serving on the PASS Board could really fill up an empty schedule… Seriously though, I always have a ton of things going on but serving on the PASS Board seemed to be the best contribution I could make to the SQL Server community. My day-to-day job responsibilities have become much more business-focused and I have gained different skills, skills I felt could be beneficial to PASS, especially given my long-standing involvement with the organization and the SQL Server community in general.
SR: What are some of the biggest strengths of PASS?
D-McD:Naturally PASS is the largest independent SQL Server community organization… it is really important to the users of SQL Server to be able to get high quality educational events (both global and local) and content that is not coming from Microsoft directly. PASS gets tremendous support from Microsoft and other sponsors but ultimately it is self-governing, financially independent and volunteer run, which has allowed it to thrive for over 10 years with a free spirit—it is tough to find other technical community organizations that have these unique strengths. I call out the importance of being volunteer run, but we could not execute so effectively without the stellar headquarters support team we have from Christianson & Company.
SR: What are some of the concerns you have for PASS?
D-McD: We are working hard at PASS to diversify our financial sources; a majority of our annual budget comes from our Community Summit conference. We have a lot of valuable assets, we just need to monetize them in appropriate ways so an off-year of conference attendance does not negatively affect our overall support and reach into the SQL Server community. Having said all that, I am not really “concerned;” we know what we have to do and are currently working it.
SR: What does the future hold for Database Administration?
D-McD:The DBA has been a dying breed, being replaced by the Data Tier Architect in many organizations years ago, a DBA role that straddles development and operations. But lines have been blurred further with the more recent advent of virtualization, cloud computing and the expansion of responsibilities to own other information assets including business intelligence, collaboration/search, as well as being stewards of the data itself with data governance platforms and processes. I think we will always have the DBA title out there, but the description will continue to evolve in all these directions.
SR:Should DBA’s look to become more versed in BI tools?
D-McD:Hey, you are asking the wrong guy about this… I am the BI guy here, so I am likely to ask DBAs how they can keep themselves from using all the cool stuff in the SQL Server box and SharePoint that would make them the overnight darling of all their business users. But really truly… BI is maturing and Microsoft BI is gaining huge market share so chances are most DBAs will or should have operational ownership of BI assets very soon, if not already – and if you have to own it, it would be best to know it sooner rather than later.
SR:What about Master Data management? Should DBA’s be concerned with data lineage, even today?
D-McD:What’s up the “even today” at the end of that question? Especially today! Now execs have to sign their numbers by law and get jailed for cooking the books… those numbers ultimately come from the corporate databases that DBA are the owners and protectors of. Exactly where the numbers came from and how were calculated and filtered and what business logic was applied to create whatever ends up on dashboard or the annual report is critical. Like I was talking about before, as DBA roles evolve, they need to become increasingly aware of the data itself rather than just the servers and storage where it lives and if it performs well, is highly-available and can survive a disaster (what happens to all that when we really do move to the cloud?). So all those data management genres that keep popping up: master data management, metadata management, data governance, data lineage, etc… should be on every DBA’s radar. A DBA, even if they are not responsible for it directly, should understand how data flows in their organization, what tools and processes are used to determine home-of-record for various types of data and how other data is cleansed and integrated to offer consolidated reporting, analysis, etc… Dang, I am just getting started here and I already wrote a whole paragraph – you see where I am going with all this, I think it is important and I am passionate about it, so that makes me biased… and there you have it.
