Keeping Pace with Change: Prepare for Tomorrow & Advance Your Career
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As an Oracle DBA manager, you have a lot to keep up with—new technologies, certifications, cloud migrations, upgrades, etc. Learn how to help your team stay ahead of technology shifts by following a few easy steps. Delivered by DBA Managers with 15+ years of hands-on technical experience, this presentation provides proven methods these experts used to help their direct reports advance their skill sets and careers. Walk away with actionable steps you can use to elevate your DBA team’s expertise.
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Keeping Pace with Change: Prepare for Tomorrow & Advance Your Career
- 1. Keeping Pace with Change: Prepare for Tomorrow and Advance Your Career
- 2. www.datavail.com 2 Change Our MindsetPrepare for New Technologies and Challenges Embrace Changes
- 3. JP Chen Director and Practice Leader, SQL Server Practice, Datavail Enterprise SQL Support Hands-on experience Combined 18+ years as DBA and DBA Team Manager, and Director Wealth of technical certifications and practical knowledge SQL Performance Monitoring & Tuning Designs and develops comprehensive solutions on database documentation, monitoring, stabilization, and continuous improvements SQL Server Blogs & White Papers Avid blogger and author, posting regular content on Datavail.com
- 4. Chuck Farman Director and Practice Leader, Oracle Practice, Datavail Experienced 20+ years of Oracle DBA Accredited OCP certificated Master of Science Degree Leader Guide team of Datavail DBAs to deliver measurable results
- 5. www.datavail.com 5 Datavail Overview Databases, Analytics, and Application Data Integration 13+ years delivering data services 300+ customers with average client retention of 7 years Managed services, projects, and staffing We are data specialists All major platforms: SQL, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Mongo Comprehensive development & operational services US & Global models Reactive and proactive services Database Operations EBS Hyperion/Essbase Microsoft Dynamics SharePoint Custom development • Microsoft .NET • Oracle APEX Application Management Microsoft SSRS, SSIS, SSAS PowerBI Oracle OBIEE, BICS, Golden Gate Analytics, Visualization & Integration Informatica Oracle Data Integrator ETL development and operational run
- 6. Win Shoes Fill out the session survey for a chance to win an exclusive pair of Datavail’s running shoes!
- 7. www.datavail.com 7 Agenda Determine direction and destination Focus on value and avoid distractions Expands skills intelligently Master the cloud Make your case for training Consider partnering
- 8. www.datavail.com 8 Determine Direction & Destination Use "The Universal Motivators" as a Compass • Time • Money • Feelings Plan Ahead Define an IT Strategy
- 9. www.datavail.com 9 Focus on Value & Avoid Distractions “Begin with the end in mind” Focus on what you need and not what you want Prioritize and decide
- 10. www.datavail.com 10 Develop your skills Prioritize your learning path with “The Pickle Jar Theory” Apply “Deliberate Practice” • Clearly defined goal that stretches your current limitations • Full effort and concentration • Immediate, quality feedback • Repeat, reflect, and refine Expand Skills Intelligently
- 11. www.datavail.com 11 Master the Cloud Understand the pros and cons of moving to the cloud DBaaS or IaaS – Decide which is right for you Learn which cloud provider aligns best with your needs Plan your cloud migration strategies Try it before you commit
- 12. www.datavail.com 12 Identify your training requirements and budget Communicate the Return on Investment (ROI) with management Showcase your willingness to help the company meet and prepare for database demands Make Your Case for Training
- 13. www.datavail.com 13 Do you enjoy off-hour work such as code deployment or patching? Form a strategic partnership with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to help reduce your off-hour support Enables you and team to focus on internal strategic projects and initiatives Consider Partnering
- 14. www.datavail.com 14 Learn Excel AssistRedirect Network Be Strategically Proactive Learn: Learn the new skills necessary to succeed Excel: Know what you’re good at and enjoy doing and making those opportunities happen Assist: Identify what needs to get done that no one wants to do Redirect: Avoid distractions and things you don’t need to do to succeed Network: Know whom you should work with to learn from and get ahead
- 15. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Get Ready for New Technologies and New Challenges Change is the only constant in life. This rings especially true for our data professionals. In the past 6 years, there had been 3 major versions of Oracle: 12.1 July 2013 12.2 September 2016 Cloud, March 2017 - On Prem 18.1 February 2018 - Cloud, July 2018 - On Prem Other major database systems such as MySQL and SQL Server followed suit with major releases every 2 to 4 years. In addition to the new versions of database systems, a good number of trending and emerging technologies are making significant impacts in the IT industry—adding to the long list of responsibilities for data professionals. Prepare Ourselves for the New Challenges As per Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” We must identify the new technologies that will impact our current role and also plan ahead and map out clear path for our team and our company to meet the ever-changing technological challenges. Change Our Mindset The methodology of "if it's not broken, don't fix it" no longer apply. There are risks associated with lagging behind current technology trends. Technology is essential for any business to function efficiently and effectively. By staying current with technologies that impact customers experience with your business and increase the efficiency for your internal operations, you will increase your company’s success. How can we keep pace with the ever-changing data technologies and ensure our data professionals are equipped to tackle and conquer the challenges that come along with dynamic changes? We are here today to share with you our findings and what worked for us and our Datavail team.
- Hi. I am JP Chen, Global Practice Lead of SQL Server for Datavail. I had spent more than 18+ year in the trenches as a DBA. I had worked on supporting enterprise level corporations in the financial, retailing, pharmaceutical, aerospace, fashion, and education industries as a DBA, Tech Lead, and DBA Manager. I have a number of certifications including ITIL, MCITP SQL 2005, and AWS Certified Solutions Architect –Associate. Nowadays, I am very fortunate to work with a team of exceptional DBAs very closely on daily basis to support customers ranging from small to enterprise businesses. Whether you have 5 or 500 database servers, my team and I can work with you to support your databases and ensure they are highly secure, optimized, and available. I enjoy sharing my new findings, knowledge, and practical hands-on experiences on SQL Server through Datavail blogs and whitepapers.
- Use "The Universal Motivators" as a compass What motivates you and your company’s management team? Chuck? <- What motivates you? In his book “Simply Said: Communicating Better at Work and Beyond”, Jay suillivan pointed out that The Universal Motivators are: Time Money Feelings We must consider and use them in determining our directions and destinations. Plan Ahead According to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey, Habit 1: Be Proactive You are responsible for behavior, results and growth. Identify your company's future database and technology requirements. We are not only responsible for our own future career path, we are also responsible for our team members, and make sure our company is ready for the future and changes. Ask and clarify. What if you had asked and didn’t receive any clarifications? Suggest and lead. Define an IT Strategy Assesses your technological needs and evaluate the resources available to you, you can then narrow down the technologies your business needs to run efficiently and stay on top of them.
- Prioritize and decide Align what you need to learn to what you need for your role Ask yourself what new skills or improvements you need to add value to your company and your repertoire. Understand your company’s goals and objectives plus your career goals and then prioritize and decide. Warren Buffet advises writing down a list of 25 career goals. After some serious thought, circle your 5 highest priority goals. The other 20 you avoid at all costs as these will only distract you. Focus on what you need and not what you want Can we get a show of hand if you had to learn a new programming language in the past year? A new database system in the past year? Mandate by job requirement? By choice? How many of us program in JSON? Java? PL/SQL? Others? 79 new programming languages created since the 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages 97 relational database management systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_relational_database_management_systems Similar to fashion, some of the programming languages and database systems will go out of style or become irrelevant in a matter or months due to demand or popularity. There will always be new database technologies and programming languages and it’s not easy to predict which will have the biggest bang for the buck. While it’s tempting to go all-in and focus on the hottest technologies making headlines in the tech world, you must stay practical and identify the skill sets you need to update in your current role and the technologies your company will likely migrate over in the coming months or years. This is very similar to going to shopping with my wife, before we leaving the house. I would always give her the friendly reminder “Get what we need. Not what we want!” “Begin with the end in mind” According to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey, Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind "Focus time and energy on things that can be controlled." "If your ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step you take gets you to the wrong place faster." We must choose carefully! Else, we will risk the waste time, money, and feeling bad.
- Develop your skills Will Smith had pointed out that “The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.” This statement has been proven true to all of us. We weren’t born with the DBA talent. We learned how to be DBAs either intentionally or accidentally. Good news and bad news. Good news: whatever skills you had listed, you can learn them with training. Bad news: you will need to spend many hours of training and practicing if you want to be good at those skills. Prioritize your learning path with “The Pickle Jar Theory” There’s a famous time management theory call the pickle jar theory. If you imagine a pickle jar and say you have four things that need to go in that jar. Rocks, pebbles, sand, and water. If you fill up the jar with just water then there’s no room for other three things. But, if you start with first the big rocks and then the pebbles and then the sand and then the water, you will be able to fit all of it in the jar and the same thing with your time and capacity to expand your skillsets intelligently. <- List and prioritize. Apply “Deliberate Practice” How will you know you’re making progress and how will you measure success along the way? This is similar to performance tuning and database restore. In performance tuning, you take a baseline of the performance and then you make your configuration changes and then compare the before and after. With database restore, you send out email communication to your boss and other department heads that you are starting the restore process and you will provide status updates on every 20% intervals so that everyone will know the progress until completion. In these two example, you have objectives, measurable progress, and visibility on your progress and result. In her 2016 bestseller, “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance”, Angela Duckworth mentioned the concept of “Deliberate Practice”. Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. 4 steps A clearly defined goal that stretches your current limitations Full effort and concentration Immediate, quality feedback Repetition + reflect and refine. We need to apply the same in our efforts in learning and expanding our skills.
- A famous philosopher once said “Winter is coming, Jon Snow”…. Or at least someone did…. At any rate, the cloud is coming. There are many applications for it, and many reasons to move, but make sure your environment is correct for this move before you consider it. Understand the pros and cons of moving to the cloud Pros: Scalability, predictability, reliability, contracts, better resource utilization, leases, power usage – assuming you can power up/down Cons: Cost, less control Learn which provider aligns best with your needs Who has dabbled in the cloud? Which providers have people used? <take a rough count of each> The top 3 are Amazon, Azure and Oracle – for Oracle databases Plan migration strategy Many different option of moving data to the cloud… export / import, TTS, RMAN backup/restore… there is a reason for each one, figure out what will work best for you. Test, test , test Try before you commit Many providers offer cheap/free testing. Make sure it works for you before you commit. Proper testing up front can reduce headaches later.
- Make your case for Training: As JP noted earlier, the only constant is change. Just because you don’t see a need for learning a new system/program/module now, doesn’t mean you won’t need it in the future. With new versions coming out every few years, and more importantly, older version becoming OBSOLETE every few years, it is inevitable that you will need to learn a new version eventually. Each version comes with new features, and it is important to understand what features are available, and which are applicable to your environment. and which could be used to enhance your current system. Communicate the ROI: Consider the following hypothetical example: CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?” CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?” Showcase your Willingness to help the company meet and prepare for database demands: Eagerness to educate yourself is very seldom considered a detriment to management. Many things can keep a manager from agreeing to pay for training Strategic growth plans that of which you are not aware Financial planning Those who show a willingness to take training courses, and keep doing so, will likely be the ones chosen once an opportunity arises. When I have a DBA who keeps hounding me for classes, I’m much more likely to reach back out to that person when a class comes up that aligns with customer demand or growth strategies. The more information you can get prior to asking for training, the better,. Check on costs up front Look for online courses Gain an understanding for WHY the training is beneficial to the company, not just to you.
- Do you enjoy off-hour work such as code deployment or patching? We certainly hope not. But, as DBAs we are responsible service packs upgrades or hot fixes release in addition to production code deployments. Many if not all of these activities require maintenance windows and usually are scheduled to off-hours to minimize service disruption. It means that after all users log off the system and done for the day and it is usually after 6 PM or later or during weekends. While most people are logging off the system and getting ready to head home to watch Monday Night Football or play catch baseball with their children over the weekend, the DBAs can be at work preparing and getting ready for the maintenance work that’s scheduled for the evening or weekend. To make sure the database systems are available to the businesses and meet the business SLAs, while most people have their evenings and weekends off as granted, DBAs have to sacrifice their quality time with the families to attend to their responsibilities. How can we help our DBAs improve their quality of life to reduce their off-hour weekday or weekend maintenance works? We can as many strategic small to enterprise level companies have started doing in the past decade – enlist the help of Managed Services Providers. Form a strategic partnership with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to help reduce your off-hour support Forming a strategic relationship with a MSP when done correctly can help reduce the workload of the DBA team and enable them to focus on more strategic infrastructure planning processes. They usually result in win-win for both the DBAs and their employers and worthy of serious considerations for all companies throughout all industries. Enables you and team to focus on internal strategic projects and initiatives Imagine you and your team no longer have to stay up late to patch a server or respond to 3:00 am emergency call out or remote in to triage an unexpected outage while you are vacationing in Hawaii, wouldn’t it be nice? It is and it can be done. As trusted advisors and extension of our customers support team, we had helped 300+ companies and their internal teams to focus on internal strategic projects and initiatives by providing around the clock support for off-hour maintenance, routine tasks, incident triage and service request support.
- In her book, “Great on the Job: What to Say, How to Say It. The Secrets of Getting Ahead”, Jodi Glickman had pointed out that being strategically proactive is to LEARN. Learn: Learn the new skills necessary to succeed In our case, we need to identify the skills we need to learn and develop our discipline to learn them. Excel: Know what you’re good at and enjoy doing and making those opportunities happen If you enjoy cloud computing or query tuning, you need to find every opportunity possible to get involved. Create and initiate those opportunities if you must. Assist: Identify what needs to get done that no one wants to do If your company has not planned it’s cloud migration strategy or upgrade to new versions of Oracle, you need to assist in exploring the options and benefits and helping your team equipped for the new changes and challenges. Redirect: Avoid distractions and things you don’t need to do to succeed Limit and avoid off-hour and routine work. Delegate it to a junior team member or MSP whenever possible. You don’t need to keep on doing routine work to learn new skills. Time is limited. Get out of your comfort zone to work on new skills and technologies. Network: Know whom you should work with to learn from and get ahead Sometimes it not what you know, it is who you know that matters more. Network with your industry and community. Learn from the people you really admire or industry Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to get ahead.
- As Charles Darwin once said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Data technologies are constantly evolving, can you keep pace with change and ensure you adapt?