Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions today at SQL Saturday South Florida. Here are the resources from today.
Deck: BloggingfortheTechProfessional.pptx
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I always enjoy this talk and I hope you did. Here are the things you might need:
I got this in an email about a week ago from the PASS Data Community Summit.
There’s more to it, but essentially I submitted 3 talks (2 on deployments, 1 pro dev) and none were selected.
It’s slightly disappointing, as it is a rejection, but it’s not really a rejection of me. It’s that the talks didn’t make the cut. I’ve spoken there before, and I have other engagements coming up at events. I’m also still going to the Summit and I’ll likely still have some speaking slot from Redgate.
For others, this might be very disappointing, but it’s not a rejection of you as a speaker. It’s that there are only so many slots, and there is a lot of competition. The program committee is a volunteer one, and while the conference organizers review their selections, they don’t make many changes. I know because I was one of the final reviewers where we looked at the breakdown of sessions in different topic areas, the diversity, the experiences, and we really only made 3 changes out of a few hundred where we saw a gap.
I don’t want to give too many specifics, but Grant noticed we had no Extended Event sessions in there, so we removed another DB Administration talk and added an xEvent one.
This year had over 1,100 submissions for 108 slots. There are a few more slots for vendors and a small few for first time speakers specifically, but that is a lot of competition. My Pro Dev talk has been popular elsewhere, but it wasn’t better than the others that were selected. Same for my other submissions.
They were good, just not good enough.
I do get rejected by some events, as do most other speakers. I don’t know anyone that is picked 100% of the time.
It’s OK. It doesn’t stop me from submitting, and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do a great job at this conference. It just means not this time.
If you feel bad, that’s OK. Just keep submitting, working on your presentations, ask for feedback from others, and keep sharing your knowledge. You’ll get picked at another event.
One of the hot terms in software these days is observability. There are a few definitions (Splunk, RadixWeb), but essentially this is the insight into how your software runs and performs using metrics, logs, traces, etc. In DevOps, we do this with an eye toward improving performance and identifying the root cause of issues. The focus is slightly different from monitoring, where we often focus more on resources and health. We need both, but often in trying to improve software and the behavior for users, developers need observability. Infrastructure people responding to acute issues and looking to ensure we have the capacity, availability, and other x-bilities, that need monitoring.
Today I’m wondering if you collect a variety of types of metrics for your software that might tell you how your system is running. What things are important to you in order to better serve your clients? If you’re a DBA/sysadmin, what is important to you? If you are a developer, are there different types of data you want?
Certainly, you might collect various resource measures (CPU, IO, reads, etc.), but there are many more things. There are logs, which could include the SQL Server error log, but I’d hope that you had a more in-depth way of measuring the activity on your system. Do you have custom xEvent traces running? Can you collect application logs easily when you’re looking at issues? Do you spend time trying to solve chronic issues? Do you look for potential future problems?
Most software applications should include some sort of basic logging of major functions, but I would hope that there are various levels available. If problems are reported or noticed, can you increase the detail of logging? Can you correlate this with logs from different systems, such as the database? Can I get execution data that matches calls and trace down the potential issues that users are experiencing?
I know that we have problems in applications. Some (many?) of these are data-related, which might be easy or hard to trace down. That often depends if the data changes too quickly or is static enough for someone to investigate a report. Some errors are logical code errors, which might indicate a lack of testing early in the software process, but we ought to be able to determine this quickly from logs. If there are performance issues, and we have a lot of these, how easily can we verify a problem?
Let us know what types of metrics help you solve issues. I certainly think that you should have some sort of monitoring and observability system in place that helps you dive deep into the database, especially concerning execution plans at the time of the issue. The situation can change quickly inside a database, so capturing data regularly is important. If there is something you wish you had, let us know as well. Maybe someone else will have a neat solution for you.
Steve Jones
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addleworth – adj. unable to settle the question of whether you’re doing okay in life; feeling torn between conflicting value systems and moveable goalposts, which makes you long for someone to come along and score your progress in discrete and measurable units – points, dollars, friends, followers, or a grade point average – which may not clear up where you’re going, but would at least reassure you that you’re one step closer to getting there.
This is certainly something I’ve felt, often with my financial future and career. I feel this when looking at my salary or my savings and wondering if I’m doing okay compared to others. Often, I’ve compared myself to others and tried to establish a comparative metric that helps me determine if I’m doing well.
This used to be dollars, and for the most part, I’ve given up on this. Once in awhile I look at someone and think “could I be like them” or “should I try to do what they do” to achieve something similar, but I quickly look at my self of happiness, stress, and other ephemeral metrics to realize I have a great life and shouldn’t bother measuring whatever I’m observing.
From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
