Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Our Meeting and The Day Out

Last week, Redgate Software had a large company meeting and our annual Day Out, with myself and a few dozen of our US employees in the UK for meetings and the event. It was fun, and a good time. I haven’t been to a company meeting live in 6 or so years and I’ve never been to a day out, so I was excited to go.

I was asked to do the opening at the company meeting. Normally our CEO, Simon Galbraith, does an opening and introduces new starters. However with all the US people over, I got to get up first and try to inspire, motivate, and entertain a bit.

Our servery, the canteen where we eat breakfast and lunch was pretty packed on Thursday. I got up and had some fun, showing some images from the ranch of my hard work.

And telling all the youngsters that the worst job in the world was somewhere out there, but not at Redgate.

I think I motivated people a bit and got them excited about the company. That was part of the meeting, and I truly believe that. Of the 10 or so companies I’ve worked for, this is the best one for a lot of reasons, but mostly because people are respected and get to contribute. We have opportunity and responsibility, and it’s a good mix.

Afterwards we had a Nerf war in the two story atrium, which delayed a meeting for me, however it was worth it to watch the festivities.

Everyone was well armed from the Gun Shop.

The Day Out

The Day Out is really a teambuilding event. I got out of a taxi at the Cambridge Rugby Club to see all kinds of tents and apparatus set up.

We divided up into teams of 7-8 people and set about competing against each other. We had some mental events, like safe cracking.

Along with a puzzle competition where we had to use the equipment outside the striped tape to get the black box out of the middle, without stepping inside. That was challenging, and with another team trying, we couldn’t do it.

There were physical events as well. We had a sweeper (like on Wipeout) that we competed against and our team tied.

We also had a tug of war, with two of us tied together with a bungee cord. We had to race in opposite directions for about 20-30 ft. and grab a plastic brick from an inflated stand. I have to say that I lost 2/3 chances I had, but I was proud of the one I did win. My competition was a new salesperson, Colin Tanigawa, who just graduated from the University of Washington. He’s 23, and he played football there.

Needless to say, I’m more than twice his age, so I was glad to take one from him. I got to go a second time, as the other team had an extra person, and I raced against a developer. My team leader got a sequence shot of my on the second try, when we broke the bungee. Fortunately I’d won both, so that was that.

We had lunch, competed more, in ax throwing, dog agility, and more. All in all, a fun day capped by a BBQ. My wife joined me and we relaxed and chatted with people into the night.

I had a good time with my team, and my leader, Charlotte, shown below.

I’m hoping to go back again for another day out.

June 23, 2015
Skill Supply and Demand

Across my career, I’ve seen many managers and executives promote and press for IT groups to consider alternative technologies. The mass media has often promoted new platforms and languages as a more efficient way to build software. Some of their claims might be true, but I think there’s a much bigger factor than technology in how well your software is written.

Your employees’ skills are probably the most important influence on the quality of your systems. The technology doesn’t matter if the staff doesn’t understand it. I think it’s even more important to be sure that you can replace your staff. People will come and go in your organization.

I was reading about the development of RavenDB, which is a another platform. It’s written in C#, and the maintainer of the project was asked about moving to F#. His answer, which I found fascinating, was about the supply of F# programmers, both in numbers and cost. There is a lot of debate in the comments, and I find it interesting how differently many people see the world with regards to this issue.

I think about this as we look at NoSQL platforms, or even other RDBMSes. How easy would it be to dramatically port your software to another data store? Probably not easy, and not inexpensive. The time for training and rewriting code would be very expensive, so much so that it’s often not worth the effort. However the more esoteric your choice of platform, the more difficult it can be to find staff that can even manage your system.

I don’t think any of the main RDBMSes have a shortage of talented people, but I do think that it can be hard to find employees in some of the NoSQL systems. While I think most smart people could learn a new system, it has to be worth it to your organization to pay someone to learn a new skill.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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June 23, 2015
I have an ask…

I heard this quite a bit recently while up in Redmond.

"I have an ask for you"

"Do you have an ask?"

and more. It’s annoying, and disturbing. Hearing that distracts me from the conversation taking place. I keep wanting to say “do you mean you have a request?”

Even Microsoft employees don’t love it. However, the usage is not necessarily incorrect, which surprises me. And further annoys me.

I’m sure there’s no way to stop it, but it reads like poor choice of words, picked to seem cool or hip.

It’s not for me, and it doesn’t encourage me to do anything for you.

June 22, 2015
The Test of Time

This editorial was originally published on June 25, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town.

IBM turns 100, and in , they brag about bench pressing more other companies half its age. That’s a great headline, and I still remember when IBM was not only the premier hardware vendor of the computer world, but also the largest software maker as well. The “Smarter Planet” ads that IBM puts out there are great, and they are a diverse company, covering so many different industries and locations that it’s hard to comprehend everything they are working on.

The culture and mission of IBM has changed in 100 years, but it’s still amazing that the company has survived. I think back to the tech companies of my youth, and many of them are gone. Who remembers 3COM? Anyone set up a Wellfleet router? DEC becoming Compaq, and now HP. Apple is still around, but Sun Microsystems is disappearing into Oracle. Microsoft is only 30 years old.

I once worked for a hundred year old company, one that embraced and remembered it’s history, even as it evolved in the modern world. The President of the company had worked there for his whole career, taking over for his father that had worked there almost his whole life and still came into the office a few days a week at age 80. There was a sense of history, tradition, and pride that kept people working there, with the vast majority of the company having worked there over a decade when I was hired.

The modern world is fast paced, rapidly changing, and evolving quickly, but there is something to be said for adapting to fit in, while maintaining your mission and ideals. I hope that more companies would look beyond their next quarter or year and make the attempt to build a business that they are proud of, and can survive a hundred years into the future.

Steve Jones

June 22, 2015