{"id":256,"date":"2009-06-13T23:54:48","date_gmt":"2009-06-13T21:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/?p=256"},"modified":"2009-06-13T23:54:48","modified_gmt":"2009-06-13T21:54:48","slug":"lost-the-database-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2009\/06\/13\/lost-the-database-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost: The Database Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, picture the scenario. White sand and palm trees. Tropical sun, warm breeze and crystal clear waters. And a laptop with wifi access to the office.<\/p>\n<p>Hmmm, something doesn&#8217;t quite fit there. Though I must admit I really like the idea of telecommuting from a tropical beach. Must speak to the boss about that&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>This is probably one of the more creative of the blog memes that go around, this time <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ford-it.com\/sqlagentman\/?p=268\">originally from Tim Ford<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cSo You\u2019re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you\u2019re still on the clock at work.\u00a0 Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let\u2019s roll with it; we\u2019ll call it a <em>virtual<\/em> deserted island.\u00a0 Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due,\u00a0no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you\u2019ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, actually that&#8217;s almost the situation I&#8217;ve been in for the last couple months. Except the &#8216;on-the-clock&#8217; part. And the deserted island part. Also I don&#8217;t admin servers so there&#8217;s no pile of outstanding backups or standardisation to do.<\/p>\n<p>Ok, so let&#8217;s say that I had a month with no projects and that I couldn&#8217;t work on any personal or community stuff in that time. What would be sitting on my list of things to do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Organise documentation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Pretty much anyone who knows me would say that I&#8217;m pretty disorganised, and it&#8217;s true. I have IT-related documentation, presentations, saved articles, webcasts and podcasts scattered across two computers and several stacks of DVDs. One of the first things on my to-do list would be to start organising it. Not organise everything, that would take far more than a month, but start organising.<\/p>\n<p>I have Sharepoint set up on a server here and the very beginnings of an IT library on it. The first goal would be to get the IT-related articles and saved blog posts into a sharepoint library and categorised.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Learn Sharepoint<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To go with the previous step, I would study up on Sharepoint and how it works. I&#8217;m not talking about the interface, how to navigate through it, set up libraries or configure sites. I&#8217;m talking about learning how it works, how it scales, how the pieces work together, how the security works. The long-term goal here is to be able to make recommendations to clients on planned sharepoint implementations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dig deep into clustering<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve dabbled in clustering before, but I&#8217;ve barely scratched the surface with it. I know just about enough to get into serious trouble with it. I would spend some of my month getting familiar with clustering, both at the OS level, installing and configuring the cluster and at the app level, on SQL&#8217;s interaction with clustering.<\/p>\n<p><strong>WPF<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Lastly, if there&#8217;s any of the month left, I&#8217;d play with Windows Presentation Foundation. Just because.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to tag anyone, because I think just about everyone&#8217;s done this one. I&#8217;m slow to get to it. As usual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, picture the scenario. White sand and palm trees. Tropical sun, warm breeze and crystal clear waters. And a laptop with wifi access to the office. Hmmm, something doesn&#8217;t quite fit there. Though I must admit I really like the&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2009\/06\/13\/lost-the-database-tales\/\">(Read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7h6n-48","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}