Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Creativity

    down tools suggestions
    How many ideas would your group come up with in a month of creative thought?

    At Red Gate we have “Down Tools Week” a few times a year. This is the same idea as the ShipIt days at Atlassian or the 20% time at Google; it’s a chance for employees to have free reign to work on some project, approved as being semi-business related, with the chance to present their work to the company at the end. I think it’s a really cool idea, though I’ve yet to come up with an idea that I’d want to take a week off to work on.

    When I look at companies and think about the time spent on various projects and efforts, I think much of it is useful, but I’m not sure it’s critical. All too often we get caught up in the idea that getting project X done or finishing a piece of software will make or break a company. The reality is while the item might be important, most of the time it will be later than scheduled, and the company will survive. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they’re rare. Most of the time things run late, which makes me question whether or not managers should be pressing so hard to get every project finished on time.

    What if you shelved all work from your developers (or markers, business analysts, etc.) for a month? What if you let them think about what they could do to make the company better, or improve operations, or maybe just find a way to make their job easier?  Would they innovate or just waste time? 37 Signals did just that, taking the month of June off to let people that weren’t running day to day operations work on whatever they wanted. They got a lot of ideas, some of which they are going to implement.

    It sounds crazy, but if a small company can do it, one where everyone wears multiple hats, couldn’t you do with with your department? I’m sure you could. Now if you can only convince management that “thinking time” can be just as important as the rest of your daily job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Talking Career and Unstructured Data

    The Denver SQL Saturday is coming in less than two weeks, SQL Saturday #169 is our second event in Denver, and the fifth in the state and I am honored to be able to speak. I have two sessions on the schedule:

    These are both presentations I’ve done in other places, and they’ve been received well. I’m looking forward to giving them again, and I hope that I’ll see some of you there.

    My busy fall actually starts a few days earlier, where I’ll be giving a talk on Contained Databases at the Colorado Springs User Group on Sept 19.

    After these two events, I start out on the SQL in the City Tour and then hit Dev Connections in October before finishing up at the other Colorado SQL user groups in November. Across those events I end up going to 11 events and giving 21 presentations.

    Whew, I need some tea and honey for my throat.

  • Mining and Algorithms

    Amazon
    The recommendation engine is the result of some complex algorithms

    When we publish articles that look at the performance of T-SQL code, the pieces are very popular. It seems that people are always willing to learn how to write better code, and there is no shortage of people willing to discuss the methods, the results, and the implications of various techniques. It also seems there is no shortage of argument and debate that take place in the discussions as to the best way to solve problems.

    However we don’t really understand what will resonate with people, or what things they’d like to learn. What we would like is a system like Amazon’s recommendation engine that might help us improve traffic, and also bring you information that is more relevant and interesting to your career. If you’ve ever purchased something from Amazon and then browsed their site, you might notice the recommendations appearing all over the site. If you’ve received an email from them, you might see some interesting items suggested to you.

    Amazon knows their engine is valuable, and it’s constantly being refined. We don’t know exactly what they use to build the recommendations, but they are constantly analyzing the results and tweaking their system. That makes sense for their commerce oriented business, since they can easily measure the results by looking at sales, but it might also make sense for other businesses. Many of us have reports, and other queries used to perform analysis on our data. Do we regularly analyze the performance of those algorithms and look to tweak them?

    I’ve found many employers in the past were content to develop a system and leave it alone until some new requirement arose. One company didn’t like that approach, and regularly looked to tweak our systems to try and get more performance out of an inventory analysis application. It was frustrating to regularly rewrite a series of reports, but also challenging to try and find ways to solve a complex problem.

    As more and more data professionals begin to work in the analysis and business intelligence areas, learning to build algorithms, and tweak them over time, will be more and more important. It will be challenging, but it should be fun if you are excited by the challenge of improving your algorithms over time.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • T-SQL Tuesday #34 – Help! I Need Somebody

    tsqltuesday

    I couldn’t resist, so here goes….

    Help, I need some data,
    Help, not just any data,
    Help, I was told you need a report, help.
    When I was younger, so much smarter than today,
    I never needed any query help in any way.
    But now these reports are long, I’m not working late nights,
    Now I find I’ve got to ask for help on window functions.
    Help me if you can, I need a rank 
    And I do appreciate the over clause.
    Help me, get my report back to the client,
    Won’t you please, please help me.
    And now T-SQL has changed in oh so many ways,
    the over clause just seems to vanish in the haze.
    But every now and then I feel I know row_number,
    I know I need a lag or lead just not sure which to use.
    Help me if you can, I’m feeling slow
    And I do appreciate returning more rows.
    Help me, get my query back to the client,
    Won’t you please, please help me, help me, help me, oh.

    The Rules

    T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different blogger every month. This month is hosted by Rob Volk with the theme of “Help, I Need Somebody”.

    If you’re like to participate, just write a post, publish it on the appropriate day and link to the host’s post. If you want to host, contact the founder, Adam Machanic (b|t).