Kenneth Fisher has spent his entire 30-year career working with data in one form or another. He’s used SQL Server since SQL 2000, and he has enjoyed almost every minute of it. Kenneth is a strong advocate for blogging. He has blogged twice a week at SQLStudies.​com for more than five years. He keeps a public list of blogging ideas in case anyone else needs one, as well as lists of free tools and education resources. He also believes that learning should be fun—he writes SQL Server–related crossword puzzles for SQLServerCentral​.​com . He was awarded the Microsoft MVP in the Data Platform category.

Currently, Kenneth works at a large international insurance company with a couple of dozen other database administrators (DBAs). His job is best described as “supporting the developers.”

Kenneth’s current hobby—aside from SQL Server—is making small metal models. He enjoys spending time with his wife of 20 years and his 14-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. You can find him in person in Sherman, Texas, or on Twitter as @sqlstudent144.

Mala Mahadevan: Describe your journey into the data profession.

Kenneth Fisher: Okay, I’m going to start with one word. Nepotism. I met this guy when I was in college. We were taking a programming class and became good friends. Later, he ended up getting me my first job and several other jobs as well. The big one was where I was living in Houston and wanted to move back to Austin. My friend told me, “We need a new DBA/developer for FoxPro. I said, “I don’t know FoxPro.” He said. “That’s okay. I’ve told the boss that you have a year experience in it. I’ll help you wherever you get stuck.” It helped that he was the hiring manager, too. So needless to say, I went to work there. He had a very interesting style of helping me. This was twenty-five years ago. There was no Internet as we know it today. His method of helping me was to tell me to look in books and at the online help. It was frustrating but it taught me to be very self-reliant. From there, I ended up with another job with him. I was doing FoxPro, and they started converting to SQL Server. I decided at that point to give it a shot as a contractor for a while.

I quickly realized I hated being a contractor and went back to work at the same company that I had just left. I was doing FoxPro to SQL conversion, which I quite enjoyed. From there, I went on to several other SQL jobs. Years later, I went to my first conference, which was the PASS rally in Dallas. I loved it. I fell in love with the community. I fell in love with the sessions, the people, and the energy. A few years later, I started blogging. Over time, I wound up here.

Mala: Describe a few things that you wish you knew when you started your career that you know now and that you would recommend to newcomers in this line of work.

Kenneth: Don’t assume you know everything. You don’t. The more you learn, the more you’re going to realize you don’t know. Be willing to learn. Always be involved in learning something new. Share what you know because that’s the best way to learn it, at least in my opinion. Enjoy the community. We’re very lucky to have a very active community. I’ve talked to a guy who had a database get corrupted at three o’clock in the morning. He got online and there were people in the community who happily spent the rest of the night talking him through how to fix it. The more you put into the community, the happier they’re going to be to help you through situations like that.

Mala: How can people put more into the community?

Kenneth: Answering forums is a great way to learn stuff.

Mala: Give some examples of forums that you like.

Kenneth: I’m very big on Stack Exchange, the DBA part of Stack Overflow. SQL Server Central is also really good, as is Ask SQL Server Central. Those are the ones that I primarily use, though there are others out there. By answering a question, you’ll learn a lot because you have to condense your thoughts and your knowledge down to something that somebody who’s just reading this—who isn’t in front of you to ask questions—is able to understand. You have to recognize the little pieces that don’t really make sense. You have to go out and learn what needs to go into filling that hole. You’ll format your knowledge better. You’ll learn it better. You don’t necessarily get a whole lot more depth, though you can. It will solidify the knowledge you have a bit better.

There’s blogging, of course, which is what I tend to do a lot. It’s similar to answering questions on a forum. You have to put your thoughts down in such a way that you’re teaching someone who isn’t there to ask questions. You really have to format it well, so that they’re going to be able to read it and make sense of what you’re doing.

Like right now, I’ve been thinking about the fact that in Azure you can create—by using one of their templates—a VM with SQL Server already on it. But you have very limited ability to change the settings. I tried it, and I wrote a blog about it, just to see what the limitations were.

Now I’m doing the next step, which is to create a VM and install SQL Server separately. From there, I’m going to try and create a template that creates that VM with SQL Server with those settings on a third VM. Each one of those is going to be a blog that describes how it went. It may not work out. Sometimes the answer is, “No, you can’t do it that way.” Sometimes that’s worth writing in a blog and sometimes it’s not. Either way, you learn something.

There are so many different ways that you can become part of the community. You don’t even have to share. You don’t have to be the type that blogs, or speaks, or answers forum questions. You can be the kind of person that sets up SQLSaturdays or that goes to SQLSaturdays and fills bags, and hands out stuff and directs traffic. They’re all necessary pieces to making this stuff work. We keep talking about SQLSaturdays because they’re very common, they’re free, and they’re easy to do, but they’re just one of several different community events.

There’s also just your local user group—PASS or something else. And online users’ groups. They’re always looking for speakers. They’re always looking for help with things. There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. Even if you choose not to do any of that, going to the sessions and just being a part of it in the sense that you’re a body filling a chair, you’re learning and it’s worthwhile.

Mala: What is a typical day in your life as a DBA?

Kenneth: I like answering questions. I enjoy that. Problem solving is one of the things that I really have fun with. So that’s where I’ve directed my career. A day in my life is getting the obnoxious problems. I get the person who’s having a hard time connecting or needs help tuning a difficult query. I get a lot of calls from co-workers who are also DBAs.

My company is a very large company. We have more than thirty DBAs who do approximately what I do, though not always with SQL Server. But fifteen to twenty of us are, at least to some degree, working on SQL Server. That doesn’t include the hundreds of developers and the thousands of programs that we work with.

There’s a definite need for somebody who doesn’t do much else other than answer questions. Now, I also get the fun projects—at least, I consider them fun. One I’m doing right now is converting a database from Oracle to SQL Server. It’s not exactly complicated, other than being able to connect to Oracle. I’m just going to use SISS [SQL Server Integration Services], but I’ve got to get the connection to Oracle to work right, and I’ve never done that before. I tend to get those kinds of things.

I’ve also gotten to do some cloud stuff. Both AWS [Amazon Web Services] and Azure. Maybe not as much as I probably should, but I’m getting there. I’m one of those people who is pretty specialized. I know some administration stuff. I know some development stuff. I don’t know much in the way of BI [business intelligence]. I do know some ETL [extract, transform, load]—things like that. But all SQL Server. My day is spent working on various projects and being interrupted with questions and answering questions. “How do I take this backup? What happens if I do that?” That kind of thing.

Mala: What industry trends are you typically watching out for?

Kenneth: One of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a certain amount of following the leader in this. I look at what the industry leads are doing. Personally, I’m looking into the cloud. I don’t know that I agree that you can’t just know SQL Server. At least to a certain extent. I mean, you couldn’t only know SQL Server in the past. You had to know Windows—to a certain extent—just to function. Now you have to know the cloud, as well, just because it’s another environment that you’re going to be working in.

The more you know about these things, the better off you are. Knowing how to RDP [Remote Desktop Protocol], knowing how to use Citrix, knowing how to use all these other communication tools is very helpful. Brent Ozar just did his yearly survey on how much money DBAs make. One of the things he broke out was male and female pay. One of the things I noticed while he was doing that was that the generalists, the people who do some administration and some scripting, tend to make less than those who are only developers or only administrators. It’s not a big difference, but it does tend to make me think that there is no shortage of the need to specialize. Look at people that only tune databases, or tune queries, and tune instances—those are important skills that will get you a job. People who specialize in high availability, which is an important skill, will be able to find a job.

Mala: Now describe a few things that a DBA should keep in mind as best practices.

Kenneth: My main best practice is a meta best practice. Don’t believe a best practice just because it’s a best practice. If you’ve read that setting the max degree of parallelism to eight is the best practice, why is it the best practice? Because tomorrow it may not be. The best practice for years was to make sure that you had your log file on its own drive, that you use multiple file groups, and that you split your data across multiple file groups. That way, you have multiple spindles hitting your data and you get more throughput. Yet, now with SAN [storage area network] technology, and SSDs [Solid State Drives] and all that, that’s not as necessary anymore. You’ve got to know when the best practice is no longer the best practice. The only way you’re going to know that is if you know why it’s the best practice.

Mala: Correct. Very well said.

Kenneth: A second important best practice is to always be recoverable. When I first began to program, I learned to save and save often. If your program crashes, or if the computer crashes, you want to be able to get back to where you were. It’s the same thing with databases.

Mala: Be recoverable is very wise advice. What are a few things that you see as worst practices? Typically, things that juniors do— maybe where you are—or things that people who are starting out should look out for?

Kenneth: I hate NOLOCK. All the things a senior DBA hates—NOLOCK, cursors, whatever else. They are useful tools, but senior DBAs hate them because juniors use them everywhere, including in places where they shouldn’t be using them.

My worst practice is when you stop questioning what you’re doing. You’re just doing it by rote.

Mala: Very good advice. Do you have any experience with using agile in your workplace?

Kenneth: I do. I work at a very large company with lots of teams of developers. It is not possible for my company to do agile in the sense that a DBA is part of every team. We would quite literally be in scrums eight hours a day every day, and miss a number of them. We’d never get any work done because we’d be in scrums all day. I think the agile concepts are fine. I think they’re a good idea in general. I don’t think they work overly well for DBAs as part of the team.

Mala: Do you generally feel that it’s made you more productive than with the waterfall model?

Kenneth: For me, no, not particularly. Again, in the companies that I’ve worked with, it was the developers who were affected by the waterfall model versus the agile model.

Mala: You do more frequent deployments, so your cycle of work is somewhat impacted by that at least.

Kenneth: Well, again, I’m working for a company with dozens upon dozens of teams. When it was waterfall, we would still get deployments from different teams. They were just bigger deployments. One team would have a huge deployment over the course of a couple of days, and the next team would have a big one over the course of the next couple of days. They did tend to spread out to a certain extent. Whereas now, it’s multiple teams having smaller deployments. I don’t think it’s really affected me much with this company.

Mala: What are some of your favorite tools or techniques?

Kenneth: My favorite tool is SQL Server Management Studio. I use it to do text editing because I’m so familiar with it. I love the using Alt key, for example.

Mala: Are there any monitoring tools or any DBA monitoring tools that you prefer? Or do you like homegrown stuff—like third-party tools?

Kenneth: I tend to write my own tools. But I really like Minion. I don’t get to use it for work because I have no control over that aspect of things. Also, sp_whoisactive is a very useful tool. As far as monitoring tools go, I like IDERA’s SQL Diagnostic Manager.

I’m slowly but surely learning PowerShell. It is not yet my language of choice by any means. It is one of those things that you need to know. One of the things that you need to know, no matter what your specialty, is at least some PowerShell.

Mala: I totally agree.

Kenneth: Just because it’s so ubiquitous these days. I think it’s great. I grew up with Command Shell, with DOS. The idea that this PowerShell thing has come along that basically replaces that and does far more than the Command Shell ever could, is just amazing to me. That’s another one of those things that I’m trying to learn over time. I have a script similar to sp_whoisactive. I’ve got several index scripts. I have a backup script that checks where backups are being taken and have the template for creating a backup and restoring a backup. Things like that. The solution is useful because it keeps everything organized.

Mala: Makes sense. What are your favorite books, blogs, and other means of learning?

Kenneth: Well, honestly mine is probably the place I go to most often, but that’s on purpose. I find that if I’ve written about it, then I can go back and review it. I review what I wrote as a quick reminder of a subject. It’ll get me a jump-start. Beyond that, SQLskills—their stats stuff is amazing. I couldn’t live without it. I like Aaron Bertrand’s stuff. I’ll read Denny Cherry’s blog¹ occasionally. Brent Ozar’s blog² occasionally. I’m very eclectic. I’ll pretty much pick whatever passes me randomly at some point and kind of skim it. As far as books go, there’s an SSIS book I really like, which is Knight’s Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services 24-Hour Trainer [by Brian Knight, et al., Wrox, 2012].

Mala: I like those books too.

Kenneth: I also like Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches [by Donald W. Jones and Jeffrey Hicks, Manning Publications, 2016].

Mala: What are your recommended ways of stress management and developing a healthy work/life balance? Generally, the DBA profession is regarded as stressful by a lot of people, although it’s very rewarding. What do you do to take your mind off of work?

Kenneth: I did an email interview with Thomas LaRock years ago, and I asked him about work/life balance. He had an interesting perspective, and he said there really isn’t a work/life balance. You have work and you have life, and really, it’s the same thing. Work is just part of your life. You just can’t let any part of it get overwhelmed. I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but basically, the idea was you can’t look at them as separate.

As far as stress goes, my personal opinion is find something that is outside your stressor area. If thinking about stuff is what stresses you out, find something to do that doesn’t require a lot of thought. I build models. I do these little metal models, and I keep them on my desk. If I’m feeling a little stressed out or I need a break, I’ll spend five minutes, and I’ll put another piece on.

Mala: Oh, wow. Okay.

Kenneth: Then I’ll set it aside, and I’ll get back to work. It requires concentration. These things are very small. I use tweezers, pliers, and things like that to manipulate them. But it doesn’t require thought if that makes sense. I get a break for a few minutes, and then I come back. I also find blogging to be very relaxing.

Mala: Yeah, me too.

Kenneth: Find something that works for you. It’s different for everybody. You look at several of the people we both know online, and their big stress relief is jogging. I am not a jogging person. That would not work for me.

I know a lot of people who color.

Mala: I do. I’m one of them too.

Describe your style of interviewing a DBA. What do you look for? What are some examples of questions that you ask?

Fisher: The questions I ask depend on what I’m interviewing for, obviously, and the level I’m interviewing. If I’m interviewing a junior who’s going to be working with the administration, and who’s not strictly a developer, I might ask about system databases. I might also ask the odd question about queries. For someone who’s mid-level, I’d probably ask some of the same questions. One of my favorite questions tells me about clustered indexes. If you’re a junior and you know the clustered index is the table, that’s sufficient. I want a senior to tell me in more detail, and to explain what effect a clustered index has, and so on and so forth.

That said, what I’m looking for, aside from a basic level of knowledge that matches the job requirement, is enthusiasm. I want somebody who wants to be there, and who’s excited about the work. My favorite interviews, on both ends of the table, have been ones where we pass trivia back and forth. Not that everybody likes this, but I happen to like trivia. It doesn’t matter if you know the answer. If I say, “What happens if you run a log backup at the same time as you run a full backup?” You don’t have to know the answer, but I want you to be interested in the answer. I want you to say, “You know, I have no idea. What happens?” Or, “That’s really cool. I haven’t thought about that. I’m going to have to go look at that when I get home.” Then I’ll share the answer.

If I’m looking at a senior-level person, once you get past a certain level of necessary knowledge, I want somebody who’s excited about the job—interested, willing to learn, having fun, and who will walk in in the morning excited about being at work. Maybe not every day, but in general likes their job. If they’re struggling to come in, or it’s just work, it’s boring, and they don’t really want to be there, then they’re not going to do as good a job in my opinion. I can teach people stuff. If they want to learn and they want to do the work, then I can teach them. I have no problem with that, especially in the case of a junior level or something. If somebody’s excited about it, I can teach them. I can’t teach excitement.

Mala: Very true.

I know you really like certification, so can you share some thoughts on what you feel about people getting certified? Do you think it’s necessary?

Kenneth: I think certifications are very, very helpful tools if done in the right way. If you’re using a certification as a framework to learn, then the certification itself is just a bar. “Did I learn at least a reasonable amount of this material? Do I need to go back and start again?” Then absolutely, I think they’re an amazing thing. They do give you that format. They give you that classroom format that we’ve been trained into. I would have never touched Service Broker had it not been for a certification. I am not an expert in Service Broker, but I know what it is. I know what a queue is and I know the basics. If somebody ever says, “I need to be able to do asynchronous messaging.” I’m going to reply, “Service Broker.” I’m going to look up the commands, and I’m going to know to use Service Broker. But I’d have never heard of it before if it weren’t for a certification.

That said, if you are the type of person who wants an answer dump, and you just want to memorize the questions and the answers so that you can take the exam, but you never really learned anything, then no, just don’t bother. It won’t help. Honestly, if you walk into an interview and say, “I have a certification,” but you can’t take a backup, you’re less likely to get the job than if you walk into the interview and you don’t have a certification and can’t take a backup.

Mala: Correct. Well said.

Kenneth: If you’re learning the material, awesome. If you’re not learning the material, certifications are worse than useless.

Mala: If you were given one super power, what would you choose and why? It doesn’t have to be work related.

Kenneth: Do you remember the TV show Heroes?

Mala: Yeah, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. Go ahead.

Kenneth: It was a great show, but they messed it up by bringing in two overpowered people. They both had variations on the same ability. They could use other people’s abilities. One of them actually stole their ability and the other one just duplicated it. That second one. The ability to duplicate what other people can do.

Mala: Interesting.

Kenneth: That would be awesome. I see someone do a cartwheel, now I can do a cartwheel.

Mala: That would be fun.

Kenneth: I see someone run a three-minute mile. Okay, I can now run a three-minute mile. I watch someone take a test, and now I can be that smart.

Mala: I’d like that too. That would be fun. Thanks, Ken!