I was listening to a pod cast from Brent Ozar today, and was reminded of how important it is to organize yourself for success when working with software. Let me ask substantiate that with a question. What was the last time you had to figure something out again, after having figured it out earlier, but forgot how you did it? If you’ve been around software long enough, it happens. And, the older you get, and the more things you’ve experienced, the more often it happens.
So what’s in your arsenal of tools? Save examples of things you do infrequently. If you write a SQL script or command to do something, such as find the number of records in every table in a database, save that SQL syntax somewhere. Write a blog about it. Create an organized directory of scripts and save it in a file. Maintain a tools database and save the example in it.
Keep a list of web sites providing help content. I created my own website on wordpress just for that purpose. It has links to all my favorite resources who have posted similar tools, so I don’t have to write and maintain them myself.
Surround yourself with books. I’m not talking about internals kinds of books per se. They can be useful if you have a really thorny database engine problem. I’m talking more about books that dive into DMVs, or provide SQL Syntax solutions, such as Joe Celkos “SQL for Smarties”. The books are a little harder to utilize in a crunch. They do provide a better source for learning how to do something, because they cover more than a single little topic. I found the SQL Server book with instructions about CLR objects in SQL Server to be more helpful than piecing together different postings found in Google that may or may not work together.
Surround yourself with success. Organize it so you can find it when you need it. Share it with others.
Cheers,
Ben