The year was 2007 and I found myself sitting in a session at the PASS Summit that was about a new piece of technology recently released. I don’t want to mention the technology specifically, as that not is the point of this post.
The point is that at the time I had been a DBA just long enough. How long? Long enough to know better, that’s how long. Long enough to know that what I was watching and seeing was functionally useless for an enterprise production DBA. In other words, I had enough experience as a DBA to know if the technology would be helpful or would be a burden.
It was rather obvious that the technology was quite limited, and an early version of some far-off vision. I found the concept of the product to be intriguing, but what was being made commercially available would be quite useless for a shop like mine. And then it hit me:
I knew something.
I suddenly realized that I could ascertain if a solution was applicable for my situation. A few years earlier and I might have sat there and thought “wow, looks cool, maybe I should deploy this”. And how did I get to the point in my career where I knew something?
By being the DBA in my shop and always trying to learn and apply new ideas when I could. And much of the stuff I learned, especially the new stuff coming out, happened while attending events like the PASS Summit.
