This month’s invitation from Kenneth Fisher asks us to share our first tech job. As he points out there are a lot of DBAs who don’t start out working with databases and we slowly succumb to the dark side (my words, not his), intentionally or otherwise.
During a gap year whilst at university I joined at a retailer and their relatively small IT team. The role in the team was as an analyst primarily involved in testing, deployment, and support of internal applications. Given my technical background I supported more on the technical side of testing where we were parsing log files, transaction files – and where I was given my first glimpse of SQL Server.
Now this wasn’t what we now think of with SQL Server, this was SQL Server Desktop Engine using Enterprise Manager – and yes, my mind had blocked out some of those memories until today! All that we did at the time was browsing the tables, not even writing queries against the data, but it was a start.
Of course, the story doesn’t end quite there, this was only a few months after all.
Following university the same team approached me for a full-time position, and whilst we started with similar work, the role quickly became a hybrid. On one side we had the testing as before, and the other half was spent developing small internal web apps. This was where I first got to use SQL Server as it was the backend to our web applications. Still, with the applications being internal the scope and data volumes were small, so I was still learning the ropes and fiddling with a few tables.
Back to the other half of the role though and the testing we were doing which was the precursor to the deployment of a new point of sale (POS) platform across circa 800 sites. The company had recently gone through a merger, so the number of brick-and-mortar stores tripled in the time I was away. With this expanded estate one of the new goals was to have centralised transactional data to meet various commercial and financial reporting needs.
This is where we really needed SQL Server and one of the DBAs in the business stepped up to single-handedly create an entire data warehouse in a matter of weeks. As the time went on our testing aligned with the development to make sure we had all sorts of obscure scenarios supported and this is where I started to get a better understanding of how features such as relationships and indexes work, how data warehouses are structured, and how to effectively query and report data stored in that way. In those moments things were clicking.
It’s those light-bulb moments which – when you see things coming to life – fired things up and started to pique my interest. We spent a lot of time working around that data and the developer was kind enough to share his knowledge and rave about the recent developments or performance improvements. It gave me the sense of wanting to dive deeper which I’ve carried with me for a long time.
That was the start of my first technical role (which turned into more and more technical roles) and the start of my journey with SQL Server. It was a few years before I took up the DBA mantle for myself but since these early days I was consistently in or around the database engine in one guise or another. It was all thanks to those little seeds laid by ‘The Data Warehouse’.
What happened to this warehouse over time? Well, it ran like an absolute dream and barring a handful of carefully curated alterations it’s still running nearly 15 years after its initial build, and over a decade after the developer left the business. The developer? Well, he went on to be a SQL Server Certified Master in much warmer climates. Needless to say, I was – and still am – very thankful for the wisdom which was shared with me over the time we worked together, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for him and that warehouse. Thank you, Nick.
Andy Brownsword 