As many of you know, the WIT Session at RMOUG and subsequent planning for a WIT program has been very successful.  I just received my evaluations, as this was offered just like any technical session.  There was a wonderfully, honest comment that I hope the author will not mind me sharing anonymously and I hope my response will help her in return.

“to be honest, if I could [do] it all over again, I wouldn’t be a DBA. I have a degree in CIS, computers were the in thing when I was in college. I chose CIS for the money to support myself & my child. It was something new & exciting. Now it is stressful and being on call isn’t fun. If I could do it over again I would have done something in the medical field like my sister who is a doctor. A lot of my colleagues say the same thing about not doing IT field as well if they had to do it again. Honestly, I believe that is why you aren’t seeing young girls & boys getting into the field because they see what their parents do and how stressed they are, etc. in the IT world.”

I found this comment both sad, honest and interesting. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, who just wrote a fantastic book, “Lean In”  discusses women in the workforce, not just IT and one of the things she says is crucial is a solid support system for any woman, especially if she has a family. This includes her family, her company and her manager.

I also have a couple friends in different areas of the medical field, I find that their schedules can be as stressful as the worst IT one, especially nursing.  I wondered if her sibling’s job choice in companies vs. the attendees was more the reason behind satisfaction than the career.  In my experience and from what I’ve seen, a good company is worth twice the actual career choice.

I admit that I entered the DBA field because of the flexibility it offered me.  I first became a DBA when my middle of three children was just an infant. The kid’s father was raised in a household with a stay at home Mom.  I think its challenging for a father that lived with a Mom who’s job was to take care of the family, to then have a wife with split responsibilities and higher demands than what he may have experienced his father having.  Some men acclimate to the change fine, others do not and my ex-husband did have difficulty with this.  With a career in IT, I could take time off from the office and take the kids to doctor appointments or go to parent/teacher conferences.  I could work from home if one of the kids were sick that day.  The good pay and ability to telecommute for after-hours tasks worked well with my lifestyle and my children were comfortable with Mom being present, with a laptop as her constant companion.

As I mentioned that the kid’s father is my ex-husband, yes, I was a single parent for many of those years.  I have a good parenting relationship with my ex, so no doubt that really does help, but he has to admit that I’m the one that goes and gets them from school, the one that stays home when they are sick and the one that addresses all work hour requirements.  I would have found it difficult to locate another career such as database administration that offered me this type of flexible schedule, as well as the ability to telecommute full time, which I’ve now done for two of my positions.

In the last year, I’ve begun to travel to present at conferences, where before 2012, I only presented locally.  I now am presenting at about 4-6 remote conferences which requires me to travel and my ex-husband and his new wife care for the kids during that time.  The kids are now 12, 15 and 18 yrs old, so the care is minimal and they don’t complain too much about having their schedules interrupted for a couple days.  Outside of the few days I travel once every two months, I work from home.  I’m here every day when my kids get home and I’m able to pick them up from school or take them to appointments.  Pretty much whatever they need me for, I’m here.  I have two office areas in the home and even if I’m not home, I’m incredibly accessible via cell, email and chat.

Although I understand where the attendee to the session is coming from, I’m going to focus on where I think the real problem lies-  I’ve seen IT environments where they work people 12 hrs a day and require them onsite, refuse to comp time, etc.  This is a work culture issue and not a database administration career issue.  We see it in not just IT jobs, but in so many others as well.  IT often derives from poor management and poor work culture.

I would say to this wonderful woman, “Please, do not give up on this career!  Search out companies that support their staff’s lives, realizing the difference running a company hard and running a company smart!”

I’ve worked in these environments.  Interviewed where it sounded very wonderful and no hint of what was in store, but once you are in the doors, you are thinking, “My God, what have I gotten myself into?”  You are torn as your family has demands of your time and you have a boss that doesn’t understand why the family can’t come second, third or “can’t your Mother-n-law just take care of it?”  Sigh….

I made a pact with myself a while back.

• Only work for good bosses and for good companies.
• Work for companies that support you in your own goals and family life, not just for their priorities.  It’s should be a win-win with small compromises that pay forward.
• Companies that support their employees have more loyal employees and are more likely to succeed.  The employees work for the company because they want to, not because they have to.
• Realize your worth and work hard for what you want.
• Don’t listen to those that tell you that you can’t accomplish something or that something will never happen.
• Surround yourself with positive people and find mentors
• Yes, there is often oncall/after-hours work with a DBA career.  This is why I recommend any DBA’s first goal is to silence the pager and remove all “white noise”.
• Any manager/department that is a proponent of ridiculous tasks allocated to after hours work, extended hours where a resource is exhausted and not able to function well and/or “white noise” paging-  START LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

I don’t know if this will reach the woman from my WIT session, but for any woman in the industry that feels this way, I hope it helps them find their way to succeed.  I love my job, my company and my career.  I wouldn’t change my path and yes, I’ve experienced many bumps in the road, but to have the persistence to continue on the path that is right for me is the only way to success.

There’s an old Hebrew proverb-  “Fall down seven times, get up eight”

The eighth time rocks.

Its the beginning of Wednesday and I’m finally attending a few sessions, other than my own, which also means that I have solid WiFi, too.  We are staying at the Hilton with most of the other ACE Directors, but residence in tower three around the pool appears to be similar to the third circle of hell when it comes to any type of service no matter if we refer to WiFi or even cellphone service.

My sessions on Sunday were a joy to present.  I was quite nervous about presenting on no surprise deployments, as it was the first time presenting on the subject, but my co-presenter, Rittman-Mead’s Stewart Bryson, was at ease with our subject,let me lead along and jumped in whenever he had additional content to add. This was number 3 of 7 in a session series from ODTUG, which included Cary Millsap, Gwen Shapira, Dan Norris, Tim Gorman and other fantastic specialists, speaking on topic data sourced from Dominic Delmolino.

The second session was my EM12c for IOUG was on Metric Extensions, effective monitoring and performance pages. When I finished all the content that I wanted to cover, including examples, I found I had 51 slides….after trimming down. Lucky for everyone, I kept it high level and I am known for speaking fast. Many approached me afterwards to let me know how much they enjoyed this session, which helped secure that my decision to retain everything in this presentation was the right one. The session was sold out and the questions from the audience were well though out and invested.

Sunday evening was the ACE dinner from OTN. We were treated to a brilliant sunset with the Golden Gate bridge, which many took advantage of for photos.  The dinner was excellent, the event was held at the St. Francis Yacht club right on the bay.  OTN’s ACE group coordinators, Lillian Buziak and Victoria Lira ensured everyone was well cared for and the event was a great success.

It was another evening getting to catch up with folks, many of them that I only see every 3-6 months.  Fun over for now, tomorrow it’s time to make an impact with the Enkitec booth….

It’s less than a week away for me and I’ve finally dug myself out of the hole that I created for myself, (nothing like digging your own grave, let me tell you… )

Tim and I will be taking the California Zephyr train out again this year.  After the wonderful trip last year, we upgraded our reservations this year for the 33hr trip out and I also upgraded my camera to make the most of the fall aspen colors that we’ll experience on the trip out!  I can’t say enough about this trip, it is lovely, get to bypass all the chaos at the airport for at least one way and it’s a nice relaxing ride out before the chaos of OOW begins.

I will be presenting in the following sessions at Oracle Open World 2012:

As part of the IOUG Symposium-
Session ID: UGF10400
Session Title: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Monitoring, Metric Extensions, and Configuration Best Practices
Venue / Room: Moscone West – 2011
Date and Time: 9/30/12, 15:30 – 16:30

As part of the ODTUG Symposium, presenting with the wonderful Dominic Delmolino from Agilex and Stewart Bryson from Rittman Mead
Session ID: UGF10417
Session Title: No-Surprises Development and Environment Management
Venue / Room: Moscone West – 2009
Date and Time: 9/30/12, 10:30 – 11:30

I turned down the opportunity to swim with the fishes, ACES and other *insane* folks in the San Francisco Bay, (sorry Chet, just the idea of that cold water is enough to make my arthritis screech! )

All attendees at Oracle Open World need to take the time to see the great Enkitec booth that we have planned!  It is out of this world and can’t wait until it is unveiled! All Enkitec gong on’s can be found here.

It appears my dance card is pretty full for the entire week, with parties, ACE and Oak Table dinners, user group events and blogger/twitter events.  I’m looking so forward to each and everyone of them!

I decided to get some ribbons printed up so folks who knew me by my twitter handle would have recognition and those that want my twitter handle, will see it easily.  As I recommended it to others, I’m sure I should get a huge marketing deal from ribbonsgalore.com for all the business I sent them over the last week…

I still think they rock:

So until next week, see everyone soon!

I would like to thank James Murtagh, Redgate and everyone who attended the webinar today on ASH and AWR Performance Data.  You can find my slides at the Redgate site and here.

I have added links in a new section of my Scripts tab on this site with all the ASH queries, please let me know if you see any that appear to be missing, I uploaded these pretty quick before returning to assist a client this morning!

Thank you again to Redgate and to all those who joined us!

Yes, it was HOT! We are not talking just the conference here, but San Antonio in June, especially this June, which meant the conference could only held at a resort with a water park onsite. If you hadn’t taken a gander at the JW Marriott resort in San Antonio, please enjoy one of my pictures from the fifth floor of the resort:

The Lazy River Water Park at the JW Marriott

This was a welcome release from the heat on many a day, (yes, some of us attended the “Lazy River Symposium” on Sunday instead of the ones offered through the conferences…:)) and after the sessions during the weekdays.

Tim and I arrived on Saturday, quickly settled into our room and took a taxi down to the riverwalk. I’ve been to San Antonio once before and loved the riverwalk, but was unaware that it was almost airfare to take a taxi back and forth from the conference location. Yes, we learned…

Upon only a short walk along the river, Tim and I heard our names being called and were greeted by Chet Justice, Jeff Smith and friends, (that I quickly realized I have tweeted with on a regular basis) already partaking in beers and wonderful Mexican food. Chairs were quickly pulled and we joined in, but Chet was sad to finally realize, that upon our meeting, that I was indeed, not 4’6″, as he’s been claiming for years now.

Sunday was jam packed with an incredible array of symposium sessions, but Tim and I have been on a whirlwind busy time as of late and I won’t lie, we just decided we needed a break and headed for the water slides and lazy river pool area. Once refreshed, we headed on in for the welcome session, where I was a tribute in the “Thirsty Games”. I was partnered with Chet Justice as part of District Database (if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie for Hunger Games, none of this will make sense… ) where 12 teams of two, offered as tributes, compete against each team and then against each other as the games get more difficult.

The first challenge was a combination bouncy horse/tricycle race. I was to ride the bouncy horse down and would have won if David Peake hadn’t kept grabbing the tail of the horse I was riding (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) Chet had some challenges on the tricycle, (something about not riding one since you were three years old will do that to you…) and I had to explain to him after they eliminated 70% of the tribute teams with the lowest times, that if we had been in the actual movie, we were lying dead in the carnage during the opening game scene… poor Chet…

Throughout the three day event, I enjoyed presentations by Jonathan Lewis, Jean Pierre Dijcks, Alex Gorachev, Cary Millsap, Steven Feuerstein, Dominic Delmolino and Maria Colgan, along with others. I attended after-sessions get-togethers with friends and groups, including Monday’s ACE event and a second one for ODTUG in the beautiful suites at the JW Marriott. The food was wonderful, no matter if it was part of the event or eating at one of the great places at the resort.

Where at Monday, I stayed close to the booth, only attending two sessions and the ACE event, Tuesday, was a full day, starting out with my own session, first thing in the morning. I was actually surprised to have as many attendees as I did, joking that I didn’t think there were 20 DBA’s at the event! I spoke on EM12c, (of course, it is the subject of the year for me…) doing a bit more of a deep dive on EM12c features and it went extremely well. I was satisfied with the attendance- thank you for your support Jonathan Lewis, Dominic Delmolino and Tim Gorman, who also served as my room ambassador. A special thanks to Dominic who tweeted up my session, (causing me to have to silence my phone immediately, as I had forgotten to beforehand!) and Niall Litchfield, who responded via Twitter in regards to the tweets on my session making him wish he could attend! Jonathan is about to embark on his own EM12c installation, so along with offering his comedic touch to the session, I appreciated his insight and interaction with the audience.

I returned and did my duty at the Enkitec booth post my session, talking to folks as they came by the booth. The Enkitec booth was consistently and proudly packed during each session break throughout the entire conference. Doug Gault and Scott Spendolini, our new team members, really drew folks in with their Apex knowledge.

Last two sessions of the day, I ensured that Jean Pierre Dijcks and Alex Gorbachev sessions were well cared for, handing out evaluation forms and even gave out my business card in the end of one of Alex’s “Metric Plug-in’s for EM12c” for some features that were outside of Alex’s presentation but fell into my arena. Jean Pierre is now heading up Oracle’s Big Data arena and his session was fantastic, discussing big data, hadoop with Exadata and database technology in general. It was a great ground-up session that I felt many really need to attend to get a solid understanding vs. just knowing the buzz words. Post the last session, we had a great Enkitec meetup with friends and then the Enkitec folks went out for a wonderful dinner. As I rarely see my actual coworkers, it was a great chance to visit with Veronica Stigers, Kerry Osborne, along with peers and my new coworkers, Doug Gault and Scott Spendolini.

Wednesday was hoe-down day. I did attend Steven Feuerstein’s session that day, adding what was another ribbon to my already, “my coat of many colors” as coworker Julia Gibson had referred to it. I was disappointed when Steven asked the DBA’s in the session why wouldn’t they give permissions to V$ and DBA views to developers and the archaic, bizarre statement was stated even by the DBA sitting next to me, “…then they can see other people stuff..” I immediately started a disagreement, as my take is this, “No DBA is allowed to complain about lack of quality in code if they do not allow the developer to view the same valuable performance data they can view.” Post this statement, the DBA next to me scooted his chair away from me, (yeah, I was real disappointed by that…) Yes, there will be an article on this subject very soon to follow.

I was originally scheduled to present on Wednesday afternoon, but was moved at the last minute to the early Tuesday slot. I decided in the end, although some folks told me that they missed my session due to the abrupt change, that I was happy about the change as many, in preparation for the rodeo that evening, took the afternoon off to swim. I was one of those and couldn’t get over the amount of KSCOPE folks in the lazy river and on the slides. Tim and I went out with Alex Gorbachev, Lisa Dobson and Dominic Delmolino. We also found out why they recommend the smaller person be in the front of the double-sectioned intertubes. Tim was in front, we hit the end of the slide and Alex Gorbachev just about fell over laughing when I catapulted out of the back section of the intertube, (no, there isn’t any video of that…)

After cooling off sufficiently, we all met up to head out for the rodeo. They directed us in groups to buses that dropped everyone off at the Knibbe ranch, a full running ranch and rodeo. We were then treated to a great barbeque dinner, live band, armadillo racing and mechanical bull rides, (yes, there are videos of this, have a few I’m holding hostage in exchange for my own not going up on the web… Working out some deals with other folks, maybe a movie night with the rest! ) We found out that there isn’t a lot that Alex Gorbachev isn’t good at…

Alex Gorbachev and the Bull

…but that sooner or later, the bull gets to even those that pick things up so easily….

The Bull from then on was known as “I’ll have the White Russian”

and that Chet Justice would prefer to keep his feet on the ground, but was brave enough to take a run at the mechanical bull…

The Bull, “There is no Justice in Texas”

With that said, yes, there are pictures of me on the bull, too. I’m proud to say that I think I was the first female to ride the bull, but did I ride well? Nope… between my weak wrists and the heat, I was probably the lousiest bull rider to be found and although I may have been on for 8 seconds, most of it was side-saddled and I don’t mean because I was being lady like- I did have shorts on under my dress!

No one said bull-riding was pretty!

My only disclaimer about the above picture, is this has got to be the most unflattering photo of me in a long time, but it’s still funny.

KSCOPE is one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. I would say it’s my favorite so far, as every conference I go to seems to be better than the last, but due to the first part of the statement, that wouldn’t be sincere and I’ll keep my current, happy contentment with this conference as is. I was incredibly impressed with the great event that Team YCC, Kathleen, Lisa and their folks put on with ODTUG. It was top-notch and second to none!

Thank you, KSCOPE and I look forward to KSCOPE 2013, New Orleans!