DB2Night Show: Episode 4 of the DB2’s Got Talent Competition

As the judges flipped roles to become the contestants this week, I thought I’d flip roles and write a summary blog like Susan Visser often does of the show.

Review of Show

We had 4 talented participants this week! It is intimidating to present in front of an audience, and I’d like to thank the participants for their contributions to the DB2 community.

Susan Visser went first. She tweets(@susvis), and blogs at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/SusanVisser Susan’s topic was “The Power of Socializing”. Susan spent a bit too much time on her bio, and thus ran over time a bit – it is hard to keep to the short time frames that participants have! She had some excellent graphics, and some good tips about Twitter and other social networking sites.

Martin Hubel was next. Martin’s presentation was “How I Started Dropping DB2 indexes and put my girls through college”. Martin had some excellent technical information that was very clearly laid out. He did go a bit over, and though packed with great technical info, his slides did not include many graphics.

Next was Scott Hayes. Scott blogs at http://www.dbisoftware.com/blog/db2_performance.php and tweets (@srhayes). Scott’s presentation included very slick graphics and animations. I liked the technical content he provided, though he probably could have focused a little more on the technical content.

Last was Klaas Brant. Klaas presented on “How to fix a performance problem”, or as he put it “Da House is on Fire”. He made good use of graphics and had an appropriate amount of detail on his slides. The content was nicely technical with a good balance of technical details and reasons you should care. Klaas was the only one of the four to complete his presentation withing the 10 minute time limit!

Overall they were rated by the audience like this:

1. Martin (55%)
2. Klaus (32%)
3. Scott (9%)
4. Susan (5%)

My Own Comments

I think it’s interesting that the audience rated the more technical DB2 presentations at the top. I also had Martin and Klaus in the top two. On presentation and style, I would have rated Klaus at the top, but I will be actually using Martin’s query later today – I just cannot wait! I’ll also be making use of tips from both Scott and Klaus in the next week for sure. Susan’s presentation had some great tips and information, but most of it, I personally already knew – though I do love her presentation style.

I thought it was neat to see the judges present, and thought it was interesting to see them mostly struggle on time when they got TWICE as much time as the DB2’s Got Talent Contestants get.

Time Blogging

In her presentation, Susan invited me to talk about the effort of blogging. While blogging is a lot of work, it has really been the stepping stone for me to take my career to the next level. I cannot spend work hours blogging, because my work hours need to be billable or related to company sponsored tasks, which do not include my blog. I spend a minimum of 5 hours a week on my blog. The average blog entry takes about 2 hours to research and write and another 2 hours to edit. Another hour a week I spend on blog design, plugins, paperwork, comments, etc. If I write two blog entries or more detailed ones, it takes longer. My husband is a huge support – at least two nights a week, he puts the kids to bed by himself so I can go to Starbucks and blog. I once commented to him that he should blog (he works with VMWare), and he said something to the effect of “Heck, no. I see how much work it is when you do it”. But many bloggers welcome guest bloggers if you have just a topic or two that you want to get out there, so you don’t have to completely run your own thing to get smaller amounts of information out there.

I don’t net any money on the blog, even when you eliminate my hours. My Google adsense just covers hosting and domain name registration, with a bit left towards my theme and plugins. Though I know I could be monetizing the blog more than I currently do – I choose not to at this time. I don’t do it for the money.

But the blog has helped me get full hour long spots on the DB2 Night show, introductions to people at the IDUG conference, a spot presenting at IDUG in Orlando, an article on developer works, a promotion at work, and a raise at work. Plus, I learn so much doing it. I’m a better DBA for it, and I fully believe Scott’s statement that “Success comes to people who focus on helping others”. Training is my absolute favorite part of my job, and blogging is a lot like training.

My career goal at this point is to be a DB2 Guru, and the blog is an important part of working towards that.

Watch a replay of the show here: http://www.dbisoftware.com/blog/db2nightshow.php?id=417