Just a reminder: you have until this Friday to enter the 2012 Exceptional DBA awards. I’m judging, and looking forward to reading the entries next week, so get them in.
A hint: communication skills matter. Take some time and think about what you want to write for each question.
I came back from vacation to find the home DSL line bouncing up and down a bit. I wasn’t overly worried, and the kids knew to restart the router when it went down, crossing their fingers for a good connection. I suspected the router might be dying, and was getting mentally prepared to go hardware shopping. I figured I’d enjoy the downtime and stay unwired for the last few days before going back to work.
On Sunday night, our connection was down for good, with a red light on the router. I called Monday morning into the Century Link tech support line, and they informed me they knew there was an outage. Good, I thought, they’ll have it fixed soon. I packed up and spent Monday in town working at the library to not fall any further behind.
Tuesday morning had the line still down, despite complaints to Century Link. The people answering the phone apparently are not any more informed by their engineers than I am. I find that hard to believe, but there wasn’t much I could do. I packed up again, and am in town working again.
Broadband access has almost become a commodity, and I’d argue that for many of us, it’s a utility. We pay bills online, get sent all sorts of information online, many of us not even getting newspapers anymore. It’s not longer a luxury, but a necessity for us to make do in the modern world. For me, it’s part of my job, and the lack of a line is a huge impact to me getting work done.
Fingers are crossed that this gets fixed soon as work is piling up.
There are any number of functions in SQL Server that are undocumented. I have no idea how many there are because, well, they’re undocumented. I can’t see the source code, so I’m not sure what’s actually encoded in the platform.
I’ve heard arguments that everything should be documented, and while I appreciate the sentiment that complete documentation is a good thing, I also understand the other side. Each item that is documented must be supporter, or at least supported in the lawsuit happy US. That means it must also be tested extensively and this means an increased load on the resources available for SQL Server. While I don’t want to see testing limited, or quicker releases of the platform, I do want everything well tested.
There are some functions in the platform, such as some DBCC commands, that are added to help support. I can understand that testing, enhancing, and documenting these functions might not make sense. However I think there are some functions, which are used on a regular basis by millions of instances, and should be documented. For example, xp_delete_file is undocumented in Books Online, and a Connect item to provide documentation was closed as “by design”. However this function is called in maintenance plans, and has various bugs filed on cleanup issues and a lack of error reporting.
Paul Randal has a good blog on why DBCC commands aren’t documented and it makes sense to me. I agree with the overall philosophy, but I would like to see those features that are used in normal operation of the platform completely documented.
Steve Jones
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
There have been more and more Women in Technology panels and discussions at SQL Saturdays and other events in the past few years. I think these are a great way to talk about interesting more women in technological careers and helping women deal with the issues if they already work in Information Technology. There are definitely issues here, and it’s good to discuss them, not to the exclusion of other groups, but just to focus on this one area. I think we potentially have issues with other groups in technology as well, and would welcome them to form their own group for discussing the challenges they face.
However I also think we need more people working in technology of all sizes, shapes, colors, genders, and ages. We hear about a shortage of qualified people in many areas, including databases, and we need to attract more people to this field if they have an interest. But how do we know if they have an interest? Perhaps a more important question comes from this MS Education Blogger: “How do they know they’re not interested?”
It seems that a lot of the focus from the WIT panels I’ve listened to is ensuring that more women get the chance to experience technology and decide for themselves if it’s an interesting career. It’s about creating an atmosphere where everyone has the chance to experience technology, mathematics, engineering, and other hard sciences without feeling that these careers are not appropriate for them.
Whether you like your career in technology or not, I’d hope that you’d encourage others to give it a try and experiment. They might find that it’s something they enjoy, and would like to follow as a career. Save the complaints, the downsides to this field for another day, after they’ve had a chance to determine if they even like working with computers.
Steve Jones
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
Voice of the DBA 