Deliberate Practice

Recently I did some soul searching about my expertise as a DBA. I am not talking about my knowledge, my talents and my work style. I’m talking about which things I’m really comfortable doing. The commands I know by heart, the issues I ran into so often that I can diagnose with the tiniest clues.

There are definitely things I’m very good at. Diagnosing why RAC crashed or wouldn’t start. Solving a range of different problems with Streams. User managed recoveries. Netapp. BASH. Top. sar. vmstat. Redo log mining. Datapump. ASH and its relatives AWR and ADDM. Using Snapper to work with wait event interface. SQL coding, network diagnosis, Patching.

These are mostly things I do every day or close enough to it that the commands, the techniques, the traps and the limitations are always clear in my mind. But there are things that I do rarely or even never. This are important DBA skills, some are even very basic, which I do not have because they are not very useful in my specific position.

These include RMAN, ASM, Dataguard, AWK, perl, python, PL/SQL, tracing, SQL tuning, upgrade testing, benchmarks, many Linux administration tools, hadoop and those new NoSQL things, MySQL, Amazon’s cloud databases, RAT, partitions, scheduler.

These are all things that I know something about, that I’ve read about – but I can’t say I’m confident with any of these because I simply haven’t played with them all that much. After all, you learn by doing and running into issues – not by reading people say how everything works perfectly when they use it.

In order to widen my skill set a bit, I’m planning to take time this year to deliberately practice some of the technologies I didn’t use much last year. I’m thinking of taking anything from few weeks to few month per technology. I’ll invent and look up “lab exercises” for the specific topic and then proceed to spend the month practicing. Think of it as a “poor DBA’s Oracle University”.

This is the opposite of what I’ve been doing until now which can be described as “read Oracle’s Concepts book”. Reading the concepts book is great, but I’m at a point where I feel that I know tons of theory and need to spend some quality time grappling with its various applications. There seems to be a lot of research that shoes that best way to become an expert is with deliberate practice, so this year – I’ll practice.

Unless I’ll run into something really exciting, I don’t expect to blog about this adventure. After all, if I start posting scores of trivial AWK scripts, I doubt if anyone will keep reading my blog. But I thought that maybe some of my readers will enjoy joining me in my practice. So I opened this mailing list.

If you are also interested in practicing with me, feel free to join the mailing list. I’ll announce a “topic of the month”. This month its AWK, next month probably RMAN, we’ll see how this goes. I’ll send to the list the questions I’m planning to solve. If you join, you can send in your own questions. We’ll send our answers to our own and others questions with a week delay (so everyone will have time to practice on his own first). We’ll discuss and compare our answers. We’ll cheer each other as we improve our skills. I will not try to sell you anything.

This is an obvious ploy. I need people on the list so I’ll be accountable to this practice. Otherwise I’ll probably forget it by next week. Feel free to join just to watch me stumble and remind me that this is what learning looks like and it will be worth it.

Here’s to a year of practice and hopefully better skills that will follow.

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