March was an incredibly hectic month for me. Actually, February was too! In light of so many other commitments, this blog was one of several endeavors that had to be put on hold. I’m finally getting caught up, though, so it’s time to get some entries posted!
Why have the last eight weeks been so busy?
In February, I had invested somewhere between forty and fifty hours in my first user group presentation, Refactoring T-SQL Code for Better Performance. I took a few days to catch up on my rest (and the various things put on hold because of the effort). Then, about a week later, I accepted the opportunity to speak at the March meeting for the other local user group, Greater Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group. This presentation didn’t require as much preparation, probably closer to fifteen hours, but it still required a significant investment of time. I’ll write more on the presentations in upcoming posts.
On the work front, I have been nursing a few longer-term tickets. Obviously, in a service desk environment, we want to close our tickets as quickly as possible. It’s always nice to take a call and quickly resolve the issue. However, I enjoy performance and in-depth troubleshooting tasks (such as root cause analysis). Unfortunately, while very intriguing, they also take a great deal of time and effort to complete. A colleague insists that I’m too thorough, and he’s right, but it’s hard to pass up a chance for some good SQL Server sleuthing! Also, I want to provide certainty to our customers and actionable recommendations that keep the situation from recurring. So, in early March, it just ended up that quite a few of these larger tasks landed on my plate. Then two of the four guys on my team took off the same week for spring break. For the first time at this job, I started feeling overloaded. Fortunately, my teammates jumped in and helped clear up a lot of the back log.
Finally, my wife and I adopted a puppy in the middle of the month. Our sleep schedule has definitely suffered from this, as we all grow accustomed to each other. By the way, I am tremendously impressed with the volunteers at the Miniature Schnauzer Rescue of North Texas. They were so friendly and helpful in finding the right addition to our family.
