Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Have Grace

    Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the US and it is supposed to be a holiday when we give thanks for our blessings in life. My wife usually has everyone in our family tell what they are thankful for this year. I also see many people posting things they are grateful for during the month of December.

    Last month I was lucky enough to have dinner with Bob Ward and we were talking about some of the things we’d seen in travels, often some stressful times for ourselves or others. We’ve seen many people get upset or angry or have some other reaction. Both of us have some empathy for others, recognizing that we don’t really know their history or experiences, and it doesn’t make sense for us to get upset. If we knew those things,  we might better understand the reaction that someone displays to a situation.

    Bob used a great phrase, saying that we should “have grace” when dealing with others.

    I love that. I know I have stressed days, or grumpy days, or times when I’m not at my best behavior and I’d hope others would understand. I try to do the same for others, and I remind myself to “have grace” now when I see someone dealing with difficult situations.

    I hope all of you enjoy the holidays this year, but if not, I hope others have grace when dealing with you. And I hope you remember to have grace with others.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Computer Algebra

    I was a bit of a math nerd in high school and college. Some of you might have been as well, but I took advanced math all through high school, culminating with AP Calculus as a senior with 11 other kids (of about 320). In college, I started with Calculus III freshman year and went on to take 7 more semesters of various high level maths. One of those classes included analyzing data with linear regression, which we did with hand calculators and formulae.

    At SQL Saturday Pittsburgh 2024, I watched a talk from Jeff Moden on linear regression. It was a trip down memory lane, with Jeff explaining how the process worked, the flaws, and how this technique could be used to do some predictions on data stored in SQL Server. It was a great session on the topic, but I liked that Jeff showed how you can use SQL Server to do various math calculations that might be useful to analyze data. I see applications sometimes programming various formulas, but I don’t often see people doing this in database queries.

    This reminded me of some early programs I’d written in BASIC on an Apple II computer. We had to do labs and hand calculate out various results based on measurements. However, small mistakes in our notes sometimes created large errors in our lab reports, which would affect our grades. Sometimes we’d make a mistake in the chemistry process and sometimes we’d just write the wrong number down (or forget to do so). However, we couldn’t repeat the lab, so filling out reports at home was maddening and stressful.

    I wrote programs that create a form and let me enter all my data. This would calculate the results, and I could “massage” the data to get a low error count. Maybe not the most ethical method, but for high school labs in which we were time and resource limited, and where our grades depended on a high level of accuracy, it seemed acceptable to me. I also learned the formulas better since I had to program them and debug my work.

    Creating a simple system to do calculations can be very handy for many of us in our lives. While there is software available for many purposes, like examining mortgages or calculating a budget, doing some of that work yourself let’s you customize things, as well as ensure you understand how the program works. However, instead of C#, Python, or something else, I might use SQL these days as I use daily. I can store data across time, something that might help me better analyze my own data with SQL.

    If you’ve never tried math formula in SQL Server, give it a try. You might have some new appreciation for the equations you solved in school, while building a little more familiarity and skill with the language you use in your daily work.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Grinding Away: Kobe Bryant

    I saw this story from Robert Horry, one of the greatest clutch shooters in basketball. Don’t know it’s true, but I think it is.

    When I got traded to the Lakers in ’97, Kobe Bryant was just a rookie. The dude couldn’t shoot threes. We would play this shooting game every day after practice. It was me, Kobe, Brian Shaw, Mitch Richmond and Kurt Rambis. Kobe would lose every time. We would get to practice the next day and sure enough, Kobe would already be there shooting nothing but threes. Like clockwork, at the end of practice he’d say, “Let’s play the game! I’m ready for you.” And we would beat his ass again.

    He would never stop. It was incredible. He practiced until one day, a couple months later, he finally won. If you literally said, “Kobe, I bet you can’t make five in a row by dropping the ball and kicking it in from half court,” that motherfucker would go out there and practice it until he could do it. And that’s what people don’t understand when they talk about champions — when they talk about a winner’s mentality. Kobe’s dedication to the game is unreal.

    In case you think this isn’t true, listen to Kobe in this interview.

    Why I like this

    To compete against others, you have to work harder. I tell kids I coach that it isn’t enough to get better in sports, but you have to get better faster than others are getting better. That takes work, it takes setbacks, it takes failures. It takes effort to overcome those to get better.

    You might not have the raw talent to be one of the best every in your area, but you can be really, really good, and you can compete with many others.

    The modern world, with jobs being remote, companies hiring everywhere, more tech people wanting jobs, you need to compete well, which means work.

    Work to improve.

    Why I don’t like this

    I do think that Kobe worked in a very narrow domain, playing his sport. His sport didn’t change much, and he just needed to improve his skills, while knowing how to work against others. He was competing in a narrower space, against many knowns.

    For many of us, our world is more complex, with many more dimensions of new technologies, unknown demands or desires from employers (or potential employers), and an every growing set of things that appear in our industry.

    Driving to continue to be better is good, but you’ll never get to be amazing in everything in tech, or even one platform. Keep some balance and remember there are other important things in your life. Not so important you shouldn’t improve, but important enough to require some of your time.

  • Episode 11 of Simple Talks: Oracle

    The 11th episode is now live, recorded a few weeks ago at the PASS Data Community Summit. This was a lot of fun, us grabbing a space in the convention center and putting this together.

     

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4sLQQR7DgYDPj2Ob1muIgU?si=e1589ae8d52947dd

    Also on Apple Podcasts