Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Are We Suckers?

    I written about learning to say no. I’ve noted that we must find a balance in life with work. I try to encourage you to work hard, get better at your job, and bring value to your employer. I certainly know there are plenty of employees that coast along in their jobs, doing often less than what I would consider the minimum. I’m hoping that more and more of you are trying to do better.

    However, when I read pieces like this one where a CEO wonders why employees don’t work harder, I get frustrated by managers that don’t seem to understand that work is merely work for many of us. We enjoy it, we want to do well, but it’s just a part of our lives. We have other things in life that we love and are more important than work.

    However I also know there are plenty of you that go the extra mile. You routinely work outside the normal business hours to solve problems, or just deploy changes to system. I’ve been there, and I’ve wondered why I’d bother working from 11pm Sat – 4am Sun for “routine maintenance” if I wasn’t being paid an hourly wage. This week, what do you think about this?

    Are we suckers for working extra hours?

    I know plenty of people enjoy the work, and they rise to the challenge of responding in a crisis. One of the hardest things I had to manage was getting people to go home and rest when faced with an extended crisis. It seems I had no shortage of employees that wanted to work 30, 40 or more hours in a row, and I’d argue to send them home to rest because I’d need them to work tomorrow night.

    I think that we should make an honest effort to give our employers value. We should do the work assigned, perhaps do it better today than yesterday, and be flexible when more work is needed. I also think employers should do the same thing. Extra hours at work should be extra time off. Compensation should relate to to performance, but not hours worked. Sacrifice by employees should be met with sacrifice by employers.

    In other words, just like my balance between work and life, there should be a balance between employers and employees with each side respecting the other.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • A Few Days Off in Space Country

    The new Star Wars film opens today, and while I won’t see it then, perhaps I’ll get to it early next week in the shadow of the US space program.

    My middle son is in his last year of high school before he goes off to college and as his birthday present in 2015, I’m taking him down to Florida and Cape Canaveral for 4 days. We leave early tommorrow, not returning to Denver until late Tuesday.

    A couple days of vacation for me, and hopefully some memories for my son. He was there a long time ago, at 2, so he doesn’t remember much. However he’s interested in flight and space, and looking to study aeronautical engineering in college, so this is a treat for him. In fact, when we were talking about where to take him, his eyes lit up when I suggested this trip.

    It will be an interesting trip, with the chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center, meet an astronaut, and study some of the history of US space travel in person.

    I’m also excited to go. Not that I want to go into space, at least not until they get artificial gravity, but I find the subject fascinating and I felt rushed the last time I visited. It will be nice to be able to spend time and not hurry around as we get the chance to vacation together.

    Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you briefly next week before I close down for the year.

  • The Machines are Learning

    One of the technologies that Microsoft is promoting heavily is machine learning. This has rapidly gone from a technology that I heard little about to being in multiple keynotes that I’ve seen at large conferences this year. It almost seems that I can’t go a week without seeing some sort of machine learning article, announcement, or reference.

    How applicable is machine learning for most of us? I’m not sure, but banks have certainly taken advantage of machine learning to reduce their risks associated with fraud and their systems work well. In fact, given the ways in which I travel, I’m amazed that I don’t get more calls about fraud related to my card use. With me in a new state almost every month, on a very irregular schedule, sometimes buying computer supplies far from home, I get called by a bank once or twice a year.

    Across the ten or so calls I’ve gotten in the last few years, only one questioned legitimate purchases. The rest caught fraud on the same day that someone tried to use my card without my knowledge. That’s a very successful rate of both true positives, and a very, very low rate of false positives. I’m impressed.

    If you haven’t played with machine learning, Microsoft has made it easy to give a try in Azure. You don’t even need to put in a credit card to get up and working with machine learning. Whether it’s applicable to your industry or not, you’ll have to decide, but I do think that lots of tedious analysis that humans do now could be better done by a machine.

    At least after one of us humans has configured the algorithms and trained the machine to recognize patterns. And, of course, with one of us technologists periodically tuning the system to work better  and monitoring the analysis as data changes.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Tracking Logins with Extended Events

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

    I was building a question the other day on Extended Events and needed to build a new session. One of the easier sessions to build is with the logins, so I decided to use that, and then wrote this post on how to build the session.

    The first thing is to to to the Management tab in SSMS and then the Extended Events folder. I right click the Sessions folder and select New Session.

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    This gives you a dialog. Like many in SSMS, we start with a name. You could select run at server startup, which I’d do in the case of this being a production system.

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    When I click next, I get to the "Events" tab, which lists all events. I’ll scroll down to login and select that. I need to click the arrow to the right.

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    Once I do that, my event is in the session.

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    After I pick the events, I choose the fields I’m going to capture. There is a "Configure" button in the upper right that you click. This scrolls the dialog over.

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    I can select any number of fields for capture. You can see I’ve picked the client_hostname. I would also add the NT_Username and Username from the list. You could add more, but in this case, I’m more concerned with seeing who’s logged in.

    I could add filters, but I choose not to. I click on Data Storage to determine where to store this data.

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    For auditing, I might want a file. In this case, for testing, I’ll use the ring buffer, in memory storage.

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    That’s it for getting the session set up. However it’s not started. To do that, I need to right click the session and select Start.

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    This will allow the server to start collecting data. Is it working? Let’s see. We’ll watch the data. Right click the session again and select Watch Live Data

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    This pops open a window. I usually make this a separate vertical tab group. Once that’s open, I’ll click "New Query" in SSMS, which will log me in again

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    As you can see, a few events popped up here. I am capturing data. Don’t forget to stop the session after this if you don’t need it.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This post came out of work I was doing, and which I’d likely do as a DBA. However as soon as I got things working and tested, I knew this was a good post. In fact, I got a couple posts from the process. The setup and testing took about 20 minutes, including a little research. However the writing for this was about 10 minutes.

    References

    A few things I used.