Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • TSQLTuesday.com

    I’ve hosted a page on this blog that has all the T-SQL Tuesday blog invitations and roundups linked. I did this mainly because I was trying to ensure I have hosted a few, I wanted to know what others had chosen. Since I didn’t see a good list, I created one.

    And I’ve maintained it, which seems crazy since it’s been 6+ years.

    Recently on a Twitter conversation someone suggested getting a central site, using a real domain. I thought that was a good idea, since my page isn’t necessarily the most intuitive item to find.

    Somehow I ended up getting a domain transfer from Brent Ozar and getting talked into hosting the site. It’s live, now at:

    TSQLTuesday.com

    I did this with a simple Azure website, using WordPress. That’s another story, and I should blog about it, but for now, the site is live and running there. I’ve added Adam and Brent as administrators, so they can help maintain things.

    I’m also open to suggestions on how to better organize things. I’d like to get a page for each entry, but we’ll have to see how that works.

  • Containers and Databases

    There’s this push to use ever thinner and lighter weight computing techniques. We moved from mainframes to servers to blades to VMs, and now many developers are looking at containers more and more. What started as a Linux idea popularized by Docker has come to Windows, with container support in Windows Server 2016. Just recently SQL Server 2016 Developer edition was announced as a container, which makes deploying a SQL Server easy, with no install.

    Is this a good idea, though? Containers certainly make sense for many applications. Got a flaky Java app that crashes? Put it in a container, avoid dependencies on the OS, and if there’s an issue, restart it quickly. Got a service that needs to scale? Put it in a container and run multiple instances. Messaging, endpoint services, middle and front end apps, all of these can make fantastic use of containers.

    Containers fit in quite a few spaces, but do they make sense for databases? I’m not sure. After all, one of the advantages of containers is that they are stateless. Drop one, restart another. That’s not something we want to do with databases, as we need the data to persist. Containers also help when the application is unstable and may need restarting, but SQL Server, along with most database platforms, is very stable to run.

    Where do containers make sense? I think for development and test environments, containers have value. These are places where we may need to stop and recreate an environment quickly. Certainly  a container with a small amount of data, say a curated set of test data, is a great way to try or test code, then destroy the container, modify something, and repeat. A DevOps process, repeatable with containers.

    In production, however, I’m not sure that there is much of a place. Perhaps Express makes sense on laptops, where we can avoid the install of a SQL Server, but certainly the data needs to persist outside of the container. We’ve seen how to do this with WinDocks, and I’m sure some vendors will deploy containers in this way once they are available on laptop OSes. However, on servers? I don’t see the place where a SQL Server container makes sense, but please, let me know if you have a place for a containerized database.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Speaking at VS Live–Austin

    I’ll be speaking at Visual Studio Live – Austin in May 2017. I was fortunate to be selected to speak again, after my first two VS Lives last year in DC and Orlando. I’m excited to go back, as the conference is a lot of fun, and Austin is a great town.

    auspk14

    I have two sessions, Continuous Integration for Databases and A Tour of SQL Server 2016 Security Features. I’ve given similar sessions in the past, but I’m revamping the talks for this year, updating them and adding some new demos.

    When I went to the conference(s) last year, I really enjoyed my time there. I had the chance to see some great SQL and Visual Studio sessions. With the upcoming release of VS 2017, and SQL Server v.Next, this is a good time to think about a spring conference.

    Plus the margaritas and Tex-Mex in Austin is fantastic.

    Hope to see you there if you want a learning opportunity this May. Register and use my code, AUSPK14 to save some money as well.

  • Human and Machine Learning

    I was reading about the Microsoft Cognitive Services and their wider release in preview to more developers. There are a few of the many machine learning services that anyone can use to build more intelligence into their applications. The entire Cognitive Services include some interesting sets of APIs that allow us to build new features and even new capabilities that we might never have considered without the power of machine learning to change the behavior of systems over time.

    With machine learning, we have more and more ways to analyze data, allowing our systems to actually react to the data and become better at their particular task. I think there are certainly some dangers in how these systems might be hacked, but for many uses, I think ways that these platforms can work with speech, images and more might really alter the way in which we decide to build new applications in the future. The goal, at least according to Microsoft, is to have the AI services help humans accomplish tasks, not replace them. That’s something I hope actually comes true.

    I do think that we don’t quite know how these machine learning systems will grow and interact with people over time. They work by analyzing data, and altering behavior based on data, which means that we need to better understand the implications and effects of various algorithms and systems. I hope that more companies and developers spend time experimenting and working with various APIs and services to learn more about them. I’d like to see more projects and proof-of-concept systems.

    Some of us will just build things that aren’t useful, or that don’t even work well. That’s OK. We need to experiment, and understand these are experiments. These aren’t guaranteed ways of producing information from data. As long as we get that, or at least understand some of the work we may do for clients will need to be thrown away, that’s fine. I know there’s pressure in many companies to be efficient and just work on things that help the organization move forward. I’m sure some companies will make bad decisions, or even abuse their AI systems. I’m also hopeful that more will realize that some experimentation is necessary if you want to find new ways to create richer, more reactive and customized systems based on the massive amounts of data we collect every day.

    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.