The Data Janitor

I was joking with Buck Woody on Facebook the other day and he mentioned he’d been a data janitor at a few of his jobs. That made me smile since I think that’s been my title at more than a few jobs.

It’s not a put down, but a recognition that I’ve handled quite a few menial, tedious, monotonous parts of being a data guy as a production DBA. I’ve checked on backups, made sure they worked, checked logs, built benchmarks, and other types of fairly boring tasks. Granted I’ve automated quite a few of these so they didn’t take a lot of time, but I haven’t done the sexy, exciting work that I read about from some of the “famous” SQL authors.

Not that I’m complaining. I have typically liked a boring job that I could leave at the end of the day and go home to enjoy time with my family. I’d take that again if I ever leave here.