TSQL Tuesday #96: Folks Who Have Made a Difference

Well, this is my first T-SQL Tuesday! Here’s the original post: link. I’m very excited to participate. The host for this month is Ewald Cress (blog | twitter ) and the subject is talking about people who’ve made a difference. I’ve been working with SQL Server for a few years and I have many people to be grateful for! I thought I’d start by sharing the story that I use in my presentation, Reading Execution Plans Successfully.

My first SQL job was a Junior BI Developer, right out of college. I was learning from Treye Nekola , a Sr Database Administrator. At the time, I could write a SELECT statement, but I had trouble with JOINs and WHERE clauses. Sometimes my queries would run for minutes a time, even with NOLOCK hints they were taking a while. Treye had the wisdom to call me out on it, and I said something very foolish. I said, “I don’t care how long my query takes as long as it gets results.” Treye just looked at me, knowing how stupid that sounded. I let it go, because I was embarrassed. He was right, and my queries needed work. Over the next months, Treye showed me why my queries were poorly written, and with a godly amount of patience, he set me on the right path. I will forever be grateful to Treye for being an awesome mentor and friend!

The next person I’d like to appreciate is Brent Ozar. I doubt Brent knows much about me, but his material and training has seriously improved my skills. Treye showed me his blog, and I started to learn about the SQL Server online resources. Brent’s also the person who inspired me to start presenting. At PASS Summit 2016, Brent had a session titled 500-Level Guide to Career Internals. At this session, Brent encouraged the audience to start blogging and speaking. I haven’t blogged as much as I should, but I did take his advice on speaking. It has seriously improved my life to speak because I get to teach people and meet tons of really excellent people in the database world. It is so rewarding to teach people a new skill or fact.

And finally, I appreciate Andy Yun. I think I first met Andy at SQL Saturday Iowa City. We were both speakers and spent time talking in the speaker room. We parted ways for a while, but Andy mentioned he was planning on making a trip to the Iowa SQL user groups so I was sure to see him again. We met up before his presentation in Des Moines, Iowa, where I told him that I was taking a job in Illinois, and I was looking for advice. By sheer luck, it was the exact same city that Andy was living in! I had no idea he lived in the exact same suburb as I was headed to. Since that day, Andy has been a close friend and mentor to me. I’m incredibly grateful for the guidance and help he’s given me, in life and career. I say without hesitation that Andy has made a massive difference in my life.

I would like to make some honorable mentions to some people I couldn’t fit in this post, and I’m sure there’s many more that I couldn’t fit in this post.

 

Thank you for being great people:

Ted Schnieders

Bill Andersen

Nicole Loyd

Fred Botts (leader of the Des Moines SQL Server User Group)

 

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close