Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • SQL Saturday #52 – Colorado

    I will be speaking at SQL Saturday #52 – Colorado in a little less than two weeks. I am giving my presentation of The Modern Resume and also doing a short talk at lunchtime on your career and trying to move forward. Hopefully it will go over well and if you’re not interested, take lunchtime to network with a few people. Either new contacts, or old ones, but take advantage of the time to meet with people outside of an office and talk some shop or career.

    There is a fantastic lineup of speakers, including a few highly respected speakers from out of town. Jason Strate ( LinkedIn | Blog | @stratesql) , Tim Mitchell (LinkedIn | Blog | @Tim_Mitchell), and Jack Corbett( LinkedIn | Blog | @unclebiguns) are coming from other states, as far away as Florida to give you some amazing training.

    From the local community, we have Chris Shaw ( LinkedIn | blog | @sqlshaw), Marc Beacom (LinkedIn | @marcbeacom), Carlos Bossy (LinkedIn | blog | @carlosbossy), and more.

    The event is on Sept 25th, and here is some information:

    8:00am – 5:00pm – Feel free to come a few minutes early to get registered and then network with other professionals from around the area

    Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church
    10150 E. Belleview Avenue
    Englewood, CO 80111
    sqlsat52

    This is just E of the Denver Tech Center, near Cherry Creek State Park and slightly SE of Cherry Creek High School.

    Hope to see you there!

  • Technical People Should Blog

    I ran across a great blog titled: Post 300 or why all developers should be blogging. The reasons given in the articles are great, and I think they apply to all technical people.

    You will learn by blogging, and you will keep stuff in a place that you can go back and review it, in addition to giving you something to impress interviewers. There is one more big reason, however.

    You need to communicate.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a position that didn’t require some type of communication skills. You might not need to get up in front of a group and express things (or you might), but almost everyone needs to document things or communicate through an electronic written medium. It could be email, IM, texting, some forum system, or anything else. However you need to communicate.

    The more you build these skills, the better off you will be. There are definitely some very talented people that can get away with poor social skills and poor written skills, but that’s not most of us. Most of us need to communicate effectively.

    To me, blogging is like typing. A developer that hunts and pecks with two fingers is not likely a good developer. And certainly they’re not an efficient developer.

    The same thing comes from communicating. You need to practice it to get better at it. You don’t need to write as much as me, or write as long a posts as I do, but by writing regularly, you’ll learn to better express yourself.

    (cross posted to The Modern Resume)

  • Searching for Plans

    I was re-reading Conor Cunningham’s “Does Join Order Matter?” recently and found this quote in the post that stood out. As an aside, read this post. It’s fantastic.

    “…SQL Server’s QP is actually not set up to give you the best plan.  Instead, it is set up to give you a good enough plan quickly (where good enough is very close to “best”).”

    I get that, and it makes sense. Why spend 4 hours optimizing a query that runs in 2 minutes to get it down to 1:50 (Conor’s example) when the optimizer can spend 1 sec and have it execute in those two minutes. If the optimizer looked for the best plan, I’d be very angry as a customer. Especially if this happened with any frequency.

    Or would I?

    I’m not suggesting that we ought to optimize every query, or that I’d prefer the optimizer didn’t try to normalize queries, or that I want to see the internal tree and try to figure out if I can rewrite the query. I might, however, want to do that for some queries. There are queries that I might want to find the “best” plan for, either because they take a long time to run, or they are run often. I could then use that in something like a USE PLAN.

    Computers are cheap these days, as is disk. If I were to somehow able to copy my database onto an instance of SQL Server on a cheap PC, wouldn’t it be cool if I could set that optimizer loose on my query and let it try ALL possible plans? I’d be happy if it spent that 4 hours and gave me back an optimal plan that I could carry back over to my expensive, busy server, and shave that 10sec off a query that I run 10,000 times a day.

    I could see some value in a “test” instance of SQL Server that just looked for optimal plans. Now if I could just get Microsoft to build it.

    Steve Jones

  • Is Your Database “Web-Scale”?

    It’s not safe for work (NSFW), so be sure that you’ve implemented a cone of silence as appropriate for your environment.

    It’s a parody of the Evo v iPhone video (also NSFW), this time looking at NoSQL and MongoDB v RDBMS systems.

    http://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/jwplayer.swfhttp://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/embedded-xnl-stats.swf