Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • T-SQL Tuesday #42–The Long and Winding Road

    tsqltuesdayIt’s T-SQL Tuesday time, this month hosted by Wendy Pastrick who asks you to talk about the Long and Winding Road. Wendy asks us to talk about your job, your road map to the future, and what might be in store for you.

    T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month, hosted by a different person. You can participate by writing a blog post on the topic for the month and following a few rules that you’ll find in Wendy’s invitation.

    If you want to host yourself one month, contact Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic).

    The Long and Winding Road

    I’ve been in the same job for about 11 years: the editor of SQLServerCentral as my primary role. About 6 years ago, Red Gate Software bought the site, and I now work for them. The job is mostly the same, though a couple things have changed over the years. Three years ago I made an effort to begin speaking more, both on technical topics as well as Red Gate software. I’ve had a busy speaking schedule across that time, and I’m scheduled for about 15 events in 2013.

    That change in speaking for me, along with the SQL in the City events that Red Gate sponsors keeps me busy with building presentations and delivering them all over the world.

    These events are designed to provide attendees with free training just like other conferences with one exception: we can talk about Red Gate tools. The sessions I do aren’t marketing talks about the tools, but rather presentations about things you should do in your environment, but I do show how the tools Red Gate provides makes these tasks easier. That’s the idea behind our tools: they make you more productive.

    This year that has meant I’m moving a little bit away from the administration areas where I spent most of my career and back into some development work. I’ve been setting up Git and working with source control, learning about Continuous Integration, and more. Mostly this is to support the work Red Gate is doing on Deployment Manager, which I think is a great idea. It solves a lot of problems and hassles that I’ve dealt with when developing software. I’m excited, and looking forward to seeing how people like the tool, as well as watching it evolve based on feedback.

    I have no plans to leave my job or Red Gate in the foreseeable future. The position I’m in is unique, and I don’t expect to move up, or around, in the company because of that, but that’s OK.

    I have the best job in the world.

  • Better Coding, More Savings

    Learn to build better systems the first time with a little investment in your career.
    Learn to build better systems the first time with a little investment in your career.

    I’m sure most of us would like to think that we write fairly efficient code. However the reality for many of us might be that we don’t actually know. Many of us use the same patterns and practices that we’ve been using for a long time, rarely changing. When we learn a new technique or find a different way of coding that works better, we tend to then use that method over, and over, and over, and over again.

    I would guess that if many of us profiled our code, and examined the CPU and network bandwidth we consume, we might be surprised at what we find. CPU and network usage isn’t something we are often concerned about. We assume that we’ve bought a machine and we should be able to use as much of it as we can at any point in time. That’s not the best approach, but since we often have more hardware than we need for many processes, it works. It also explains why so many applications struggle as the load increases. They’re not coded efficiently.

    If you’re going to work in the cloud, you better learn to code more efficiently, mostly because it costs money. If you think about your design, you can reduce the amount of resources you use. In the cloud this translates to less cost. In the on-premises world, this means better performance and higher scale. It also means less complaints and phone calls.

    Scaling up an application can be hard, but much of the struggle comes from poorly coding your application in the beginning. Most of us have heard the saying that it takes less time to do it right the first time. That’s true in many situations, and it’s true for your application development. Learn to write more efficient code and use patterns that conserve resources. You’ll find your applications will run better, no matter what type of environment hosts them. If you’re not sure what patterns and practices work well, read an article or ask a question and find out what efficient techniques others use.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Visualizations

    thousandwordsThey say a picture is worth a thousand words. An image can convey an incredible amount of information, though the interpretation can vary widely depending on the viewer’s perspective. However images can often condense information into a much smaller space. One that is often clearer to many people than a large spreadsheet or numbers or pages of words.

    Visualizations can help us understand and consume a large amount of data quickly. They don’t always provide all the information we need for a decision, but they make it easier for us to understand where we should look deeper. There’s a great piece on how visualization tools help us understand big data, and also a tour of visualization methods (thanks to Brent Ozar, PLF).

    Many of us are working with larger and larger amounts of data, and being asked to help business people find tools or methods to work with data. We’re also writing lots of reports to extract information, and I wanted to ask this question:

    What visualization methods do you prefer working with?

    If you have more than one, let us know, and if you have preferences for certain types of data or analysis, let us know. If you’ve found some techniques that don’t work well or mislead people, let us know about those as well.

    Images, animation, color, and more can really improve the transfer of information, but it’s not always as useful as we might think. One of the points brought up in the editorial linked above is that our tools and visualizations need to account for uncertainty in the data quality. I don’t know what methods and tools we’ll use in the future, but I do know that our choices continue to grow in the SQL Server space as new tools like Power View and Geoflow are released.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Schizophrenic Windows 8

    I’ve been using Windows 8 almost exclusively for about 3 weeks. I got a new desktop a couple months back, which has only had Windows 8 installed on it. My new laptop arrived about 4 weeks ago and a week later I finally abandoned my Macbook Air and moved fulltime onto the Windows 8 platform.

    Overall I like Windows 8. It boots quickly, so quickly that I don’t mind the occasional restart when an update requires it. It’s gotten to where I get annoyed at the length of time it takes for me Windows 7 VMs to restart. The restore time from sleep when I open my laptop is OSX-esque. Almost immediately after I open the machine, I can log in.

    There are improvements that make my life easier, like duplicating my taskbar across both my monitors. I’ve learned the Windows+I shortcut, which is really the only one I need. I’ve gotten used to the charms/settings bar on the right, and I rarely invoke it. Overall, this feels like a faster, more complete version of Windows 7.

    Except.

    It’s schizophrenic.

    I know that’s not what I mean. Really I mean it has a split personality, but I like the word schizophrenic.

    Updates

    When I want to update Windows, I need to run Windows Update. I know that this is supposed to be automatic, but I don’t like things breaking, and so I need to run Windows Update and select the updates I’ll apply. If I go to the Start menu and type “windows u”, here’s what I get:

    win8_schizo_a

    That seems strange, because I know there’s an application of sorts for Windows Update. Fortunately I know that Windows+I, and then selecting Control Panel gets me to the main panel. I’ve learned to use search, which I can do:

    win8_schizo_b

    If search is the way to do things, and lots of recommendations say it is, why doesn’t a search on my start menu find "Windows Update? I can search in every Explorer Window. The Start screen starts searching as I type. The Store searches.

    Schizophrenic.

    What’s even worse is that apps I’ve installed from the Windows Store, of which there is a dearth as of this writing, are updated separately. I get a note on the Start Screen for the “Store” tile:

    win8_schizo_d

    Or in the upper right corner if I select Store. I actually missed this a few times when looking for updates. That might be me, and I’m not complaining about updates being here.

    win8_schizo_c

    I’m complaining they are in two different places.

    This is endemic of poor design. Not because of the Start Screen, or the tiles, or the movement of items around in the OS. Because of the lack of integration between the old, desktop style view of the world and the Windows 8 Metro/Tile interface.