Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Just In Time

    I’m glad my new laptop shipped and should be arriving shortly. I saw this on my current Lenovo

    alptop

    I had taken my laptop downstairs and noticed the battery was low. I grabbed the adapter, plugged it in and didn’t think about it. However when I disconnected the power, I got the “low battery” message again. I was surprised as the machine had been plugged in for a few hours. When I hovered over the battery icon, I saw the tip above.

    I’ve tried removing and replacing the battery, and I guess the battery could be dying, but on a previous Lenovo, when I got this it meant a motherboard issue. The internal connectors weren’t working anymore and apparently the repair guy had seen this quite a few times over the years on laptops. As they age, apparently this is one area that fails.

    Replacement of the motherboard for that machine was $1000. It looks like it’s $500-600 for this one, and with all the wear and tear I’ve put on this machine, it’s time to just replace it.

    I suspect with all the presenting and traveling I do, I should be happy with about a 2 year refresh cycle.

    Now I just need to hustle and get my new machine here and set up. I should have two weeks for prep before I travel to Germany for the SQL Konferenz. Fingers are crossed.

     

  • A Little Empathy

    In the past, there have been times as a DBA when I’ve been annoyed by the clients submitting tickets to IT. I’m not sure if those incidents were more frustrating than the work I’ve done as a developer for customers, but both can be very annoying and stressful for an employee. I’ve probably acted poorly and said things I didn’t mean while I was upset. I hope I’ve learned to do better by now.

    Things were worse earlier in my career, mostly because over time I developed a more perspective and empathy, both of which Tim Mitchell talks about in his post on perspective. I learned that no one was intentionally trying to be difficult. Each customer or client had their own tasks, and often it was technology that was slowing them down. The only reason they asked me to do some work was that they couldn’t get their work done.

    Much like Tim, I learned that technology doesn’t exist for technology’s sake. If you just want cool technology handling a task, buy a Raspberry PI or Arduino, get some sensors, and build something amazing. However, if you want to be successful in Information Technology, and have people value your applications, systems, and services, learn that you need to solve problems. Learn how to make other people’s work easier.

    I’ve had plenty of success in my career by following Tim’s advice. I’ve made myself part of the business and learned how I can address the problems and challenges faced by others after I’ve learned what those issues are. I’ve also learned that just asking a business person to tell me what to do often results in neither of us being successful.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Execute the Current Statement–SQL Prompt

    I work for Redgate and write about products. I’ve got a series of SQL Prompt posts here on little things I like. SQL Prompt might be my favorite tool.  SQL Prompt will be yours as well if you give it a try.

    This is a great little feature in SQL Prompt that I wrote about at SQLServerCentral. It’s Current statement Execution, which comes about from pressing Shift+F5. Whatever statement the cursor is on, whether it’s a single line or multi-line, the statement will execute.

    It can be on the first line:

    currentstatemnt_e

    the last line

    currentstatemnt_f

    the end of the line

    currentstatemnt_g

    It doesn’t matter. When I press Shift+F5 in all of these cases, I get this:

    currentstatemnt_c

    Only the second statement executed (the SELECT), the first statement is ignored (and all other statements) and the code executed is highlighted.

    As mentioned at SQLServerCentral, there’s a caveat. This isn’t really highlighting, it’s just coloring. Read the article to understand the difference.

    I also have a video version of my tip.

    You can see a complete list of SQL Prompt tips at Redgate.

  • Hadoop and SQL Server

    There has been a lot of media attention to Hadoop in the last few years. In fact, Microsoft has spent a lot of resources to build the HDInsight version of the platform and integrate it into SQL Server. I’ve read quite a bit about how to setup and query with Hadoop, but haven’t used it for a real project. In fact, it seems relatively few people seem to be finding it to be a replacement for, or better solution than, SQL Server. We published a great introduction to Hadoop written by David Poole awhile back, and recently I ran across another nice writeup from someone I think is a very talented SQL Server professional.

    Michelle Ufford (@sqlfool | b) wrote a piece asking if Hadoop is better than SQL Server. Michelle notes that Haddop is a different platform, and it’s a great way to consume lots of data. In fact, she has a graph from EMC talking about the data explosion and how we still at the low end of the exponential growth curve of data production. It’s a sobering thought and I tend to agree with Michelle and EMC on the growth of data.

    I had hoped Microsoft would do more with Filestream and Filetable to help meet the challenges of large volumes of data, but it seems that very little has been done with those features in the last version of SQL Server. I have little hope that additional investment will come in the future. Instead, it seems Microsoft is leaning towards using Hadoop as one way to process and consume large volumes of data.

    I wrote about Hadoop in 2009 when it was a young project, and I suspected it would enhance and work with, rather than supplant, the RDBMS. There are certainly other technologies out there to help with this, but if you are working with large volumes of data that exceed what a single instance of SQL Server can handle (at a reasonable cost), you might think about learning a bit about Hadoop. It might not solve your issues, but if it can, it would be good to know something about it.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.