Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The New New World

    Star Trek Discovery premiered this past week as a new entry in the Star Trek series that has been a part of my life since I was a kid. I was enamored with the idea of exploring the stars, meeting new civilizations while maintaining a strong ethical stance about not interfering with their development. The idea of beaming up to a ship instead of dealing with long shuttle flights seemed like something I’d like, especially as I sat on a long bus ride to and from school for most of my youth.

    Since then I continue to dream about Star Trek technologies, which are still likely as far in the future as I thought as a kid. These days I wouldn’t want to go to space without artificial gravity, and I feel that the HoloLens, which interesting, is still miles away from any sort of Holodeck. Even the advances in speech technology, across many devices and slowly becoming more and more ubiquitous, don’t seem to be anywhere close to the fictional computers on board the starship Enterprise. I still can’t see how a general purpose speech device in a crowded area would work. Unless we all have our own moment to speak our lines.

    There are so many ideas about the future of technology and where we might go. I know that in some ways my imagination of the Jetsons, Dick Tracy, and Star Wars aren’t anything like what we have today, well, maybe Dick Tracy has come true. We are barely in space, we haven’t gotten anyone to another planet, much less explored other galaxies. We have computers that are way more reliable, but software that is maybe not quite as reliable, and certainly VR far behind what many science fiction writers imagined. Communications occur at a rate I’ve rarely seen in fiction, though with a darker overtone than I ever expected or like.

    There are still dreams out there, and plenty of thoughts and views of the future. Some sad ones, some scary ones, maybe some exciting ones. Most views are so far in the future, with plots that are too outlandish, but there are slices and glimpses of technology that could come true. Maybe instead of quick subspace orbital elevators we might get lots of hyperloop transport. Perhaps we won’t have warp drive, but is it possible to get people onto Red Mars?

    I don’t have any great predictions about the future. I tend to see more the downsides and problems that technology can bring us, especially with more data being captured. However, maybe you have some ideas. Can you come up with something that you think our children might experience?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • All Day DevOps–A Free, Virtual Conference

    All Day DevOps is coming on Oct 24. This is a 24 hour event, with 100 sessions live, online. You can register now and join in the event, watching from work, home, or even the train on your commute.

    The schedule is packed, with speakers from all over the world covering a variety of software development topics from a DevOps perspective. You can learn:

    • CI/CD
    • Security
    • Databases (me)
    • Serverless
    • and more

    Most of the speakers deliver these talks at other events, and if you’d like to get away and talk DevOps in person, join me in Orlando in November for DevOps East.

    Register today and join me for this online event on using DevOps to build better software, faster.

  • We Have a Date

    For nearly half of my life, I’ve looked forward to new versions of SQL Server. At first I was just hoping to see SQL Server run on a stable OS, as the OS/2 1v.3 was my original installation. That system couldn’t run 12 hours without someone restarting it, and the upgrade to SQL 4.2b and OS/2 2.1 was welcome. That change reduced my schedule below the 100hr/week level. It wasn’t long after that we upgraded to Windows 3.1 Advanced Server, and never looked back. Since then, I’ve upgraded through all the versions since. From 6.0 to 6.5 to 7.0, and then all the 200x versions.

    This week, Microsoft announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017 will come on Oct 2, 2017. This will also be the version that debuts on Linux and in Docker. I’ve been running SQL Server on Linux, and overall, I enjoy it. I’ve experimented with Docker, and since I often have multiple versions running, I think containerized SQL Server is likely the way to go for development systems. Perhaps even further downstream at some point. We’ll see, as I’m not completely sure that containers are the best choice for database systems, but I am considering them as a possible replacement for VMs.

    I haven’t always thought every upgrade of SQL Server was worth installing for many data professionals. I think a few versions were really point releases, incorporating limited changes that affected few people. For my own systems, I’ve often looked to skip a version, though that depends on my needs. I think SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2012, and 2016 were worthwhile upgrades with lots of new features. However, some of those features are immature, so perhaps 2008 R2, 2014, and 2017 were better choices for moving your production systems.

    There aren’t a lot of changes in SQL Server 2017, but the addition of Linux and the query plan improvements will be helpful to many of us. If you are looking to install a new system, take a look at this version. It’s a more solid SQL Server 2016, even if you don’t need the new features. I am happy that Microsoft is releasing more often, giving me the option of adopting new features quicker. I don’t know if I’d want something like graph database capabilities, but I’m glad I get the choice in 2017 rather than having to wait until 2019 or 2020.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Getting a New R Package–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    I was trying to test an R script the other day and got this:

    > library(randomForest)
Error in library(randomForest) : 
  there is no package called ‘randomForest’

    A common error if you have just a base R installation. In my case, I’d installed R Studio, but nothing else. I knew that many packages are installed at CRAN, but I’d never gotten one. So I did.

    The first step was a quick google for syntax. In this case, r-bloggers.com had a nice short piece. The install.packages() function is used.

    I decided to just try it. In may case, I was happy to use the defaults for now. I ran:

    > install.packages("randomForest")
Installing package into ‘E:/Documents/R/win-library/3.3’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/snapshot/2016-11-01/bin/windows/contrib/3.3/randomForest_4.6-12.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 177208 bytes (173 KB)
downloaded 173 KB

package ‘randomForest’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
	C:\Users\Steve\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUl3h6d\downloaded_packages

    After that, my library() function ran fine.