Second week of part-time work

Even though I was not on task-allocation duty this week, my second week of working 4 hour days seemed to have just as much admin work as last week. Still, I made progress on a few a important things. We’ve worked to reduce our nightly error list again, and I loaded some more tickets for bad data in the source system causing import errors. I was finally able to alter the necessary tables to change one of our column types to BIGINT in production, and then copy the Change Automation data from the test server so that our Octopus deploy wouldn’t lock the tables for hours again - the migration scripts were already flagged as done.

I spent some more time on Tableau training with one of our senior leaders, though, again, most of the session was looking at discrepancies between some dashboard results and some SSRS report results, which is not a fun exercise. I think we got it sorted. My own Tableau Desktop Certified Associate certification is expiring soon, so I need to brush up on my skills there, make sure I understand all of the new feature, and get the exam done in the next month or so.

My other big chunk of work was getting some code sorted for our internal gamification system. It was built to award badges, prizes, and other rewards to doing your job well or participating in extra organised activities. We recently hired some contractors to make some enhancements to the functionality, and since the achievements are driven by SQL code, and I had familiarity with the content, I was asked to update the rules to handle the new functionality.

Finally, I’ve been spending a bit of time each day going through Brent Ozar’s Fundamentals of Columnstore Indexes training that I bought for $1.50. We don’t use any at the moment, but after going through his content I think we could apply it for some tables. We have some very wide claims and policy tables with unpredictable WHERE clauses and are ‘updated’ by deleted and re-inserting large chunks at a time.

Next week it’s back to full-time. I will miss finishing up at 2PM each day, but my backlog has certainly grown.