T-SQL Tuesday: A Day In The Life

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Erin Stellato, and the theme is A Day In The Life. The premise is to track what you do over the course of a day as a SQL professional. My days can differ greatly, depending on the role I'm currently working in, and for what client. My current role is mainly database development and data migration work for an upgrade to an existing application. Last Wednesday went roughly something like this…

0900 - Getting set up for the day by preparing my to-do list. Then I caught up with work-related emails, sent a few replies back before switching Outlook off for a couple of hours - it's a distraction. I then did the usual morning routine, checking out the latest code from Subversion and updating the database documentation. I also spent a couple of minutes on the SQL Server Central Question Of The Day - I find it leads me into work quite nicely, and I often learn something new.

0920 - Had a discussion with the lead .Net developer regarding some requested data model changes.

1000 - Started working on an SSIS package to migrate data from a legacy system into the main application database.

1130 - Updated system testing and user testing environments with new copies of static data.

1200 - The client Subversion repository had gone through some changes to separate development streams, so I moved all the database scripts to the relevant places. Red Gate Source Control…I can't live without you!

1230 - Daily conference call to discuss progress and issues with the data migration.

1300 - Lunch (cottage pie - nice!), caught up on the days news and blogs.

1330 - Evaluating and designing the changes required for a new piece of functionality; then updating the relevant stored procedures before testing and documenting.

1600 - Made some logic changes to an existing stored procedure.

1700 - Started modelling some structural changes to a part of the database that was causing the developers some issues.

1715 - Load and performance testing conference call.

1745 - Home time!

I'm not sure that's the most typical day for me - I'd say the work is more fragmented than normal. But it pretty much answers the question “What did you do all day?".

Thanks to Erin for hosting T-SQL Tuesday this month!