Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Healthy Work Habits

    The stand up desk experiment from Buck Woody

    Many of us work with computers extensively, day after day. It’s easy to fall into the habits of working in a particular way, and we’ve seen recommendations from health professionals about the dangers of our environment. I’ve written in the past about your heath being an investment you ought to make, and there are numerous places where you can learn how to better structure a healthy work environment. You might even want to try a new type of desk, asBuck Woody has done.

    However it’s not just the desk you work at that might be a problem. There’s an article that talks about the dangers of mobile devices, and the potential problems of working while on the go, in bed, etc. As we use these devices more and more, it’s possible that we are inducing other repetitive motion injuries, similar to carpal tunnel syndrome. If you are a heavy user or a tablet, smartphone, or other device away from your desk, I would recommend you read the article and think about how you use your device.

    I am fortunate in that I work at home, on my own schedule, and can adjust my work as needed to avoid injury. I don’t work on any one thing for a long time, end up taking frequent break, especially this month with a new puppy, and often move my work environment to different locations for short periods of time. You’re as likely to find me working in bed as at my desk, and I can often spend an hour at the kitchen counter or the couch as well during the day. There’s also that running thing I do every day, usually at lunch.

    Working in IT is a great job, IMHO. We have a good work situation, one that doesn’t tax us physically and one we can probably easily do until we retire. However it’s easy to be complacent, and induce our own health issues by not taking care of ourselves. Look over your environment, make changes to keep it healthy, and pay attention to the way you treat yourself. You’ll be glad you did so in a decade or two.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Enabling Compression? Update your baseline

    I wrote recently about capacity planning, with an item near the end about disk usage. Someone pointed out to me that compression can dramatically affect your baseline, and as you implement it, or de-implement it, you need to update your baseline.

    That’s an important point, and if you make changes, you want to do one of two things.

    • Recalculate the old numbers to be in line with the new ones
    • Make a note in your documentation somewhere

    Whether you restate the history is up to you, but I wouldn’t. I hate changing the old values, but I can see someone not being aware of changes and perhaps getting confused. If that is a problem, and you are sure you’ll keep compression around, then you can run a quick test of compressed and uncompressed backups, get a rough idea of the ratio, and then alter your old numbers.

    For me, I prefer to make a documentation note, and update everyone to be aware of the change, perhaps even adding filters to my extrapolation routines to not use the older data.

  • No Cloud for Stack Exchange

    Stack Exchange administrators love computers

    One very large and successful site in the technology world is the Stack Exchange collection of sites. They’ve grown and scales with relatively few people, and they have chosen to host thier own systems as opposed to moving to the cloud? Why? One of the administrators talks about it in this blog post. The short answer: they love computers.

    That’s pretty cool from my perspective. They have a passion for their jobs, they like the different aspects of it, and they aren’t going to change that to save a few dollars or make their jobs easier. They don’t want to avoid responsibility for parts of their jobs, they want to embrace all of their jobs, as something they enjoy doing.

    That’s very cool, and it makes sense for a small company. However I’d hope that even at larger companies there were people that enjoyed their job. I know some DBAs love hardware, and enjoy digging into the specs and enjoying going over the configuration of every new server they procure. Me? I’d like to have three drops downs, with options for CPU, RAM, and disk, and be done with it, letting the people that do love hardware pick the actual configuration. Hopefully all of us love our jobs working with data.

    Life is short, and while there will always be things we don’t enjoy about our jobs, there should be plenty of things we do. If there aren’t, I’d hope we’d all be looking for some other job that we do enjoy.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Avon Walk

    It’s more often than not that I wake up, hoping that no new bad news comes my way.

    The short story is that my wife is going to do a 39mi walk this summer to raise money for cancer. If you are so inclined, you can donate here.

    I’m fine, my family is healthy, and lucky, and we don’t have any real problems. We have inconveniences and annoyances, and I’m thankful that’s all we have to worry about. We are very fortunate that the five of us are all living happy, successful lives.

    However that’s not the case with many friends and acquaintances we have. Lately it seems that 1 out of every 10 people we know has been struck by cancer. Some are survivors in remission, some are struggling and some are just starting their treatments.

    Perhaps it’s a sign of getting older, and our friends getting older. Sickness is more likely as you age, and we are coming to terms with this as the news of friends’ struggles reaches us. It’s sad, and it sucks, and I hope that we can find a cure for the various cancers in my lifetime.

    My wife lost her mother to breast cancer, and she has a few friends that are in the middle of their fights. She writes about it on her donation page, and decided to do something more than donate our own money. She committed to the Avon Walk this summer, a marathon one day, and a half the next. She started her training last weekend, dragging me along for a few walks.

    She is looking to raise awareness of the issue, and also raise money to help fight the disease. If you are inclined to help the research, please feel free to donate. If you’d like to sign up for this challenge, we’d love to have you join in as well.