When I attended my first PASS Summit I had been given the title of DBA in my company for about a year. My company was doing some growing of sorts and we had offices in three main locations, and each location had a DBA. But we weren’t really a team yet, and for the most part I felt very, very alone. I still remember all the times I would have a developer standing over my shoulder, or when I was called upon to solve problems with applications that had nothing to do with any issue with the database, or when I would try to explain to the server team that one big set of RAID 5 disks were not ideal for performance on the data warehouse.
Essentially, no matter what the discussion, I was alone in the room. I felt I knew what was right, but that didn’t matter. And when I would get kicked around for things (like deadlocks inside of a vendor application) I had nobody to talk with. Face it, the only other person to understand what life is like as a database professional is another database professional.
I was fortunate to have met Pat Wright (blog | @sqlasylum) and Allen Kinsel (blog | @sqlinsaneo) at my first Summit. Immediately I was able to discover that the issues I faced were not unique. I still remember having dinner that week with Pat and Allen, and talking about auditors, about crappy code, and even about the value of certifications.
After that first Summit I felt more confident about my skills and abilities as a DBA.
I no longer felt alone.
