Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Enjoying Australia

I’ve been gone from home for two weeks, though I’ve only been in Australia for about 12 days. I lost a day in flight going across the date line. I’ll get that back later this week as I’ll actually land in LA a few hours before I left Melbourne. I leave Fri morning at 930a and arrive in LA Fri morning at 640a. That’s a crazy time travel situation.

In any case, I’ve had a good time here. My wife and I spent a week doing some touristy stuff. The iconic shot with the Opera House was first, along with some travels around the area and a nice relaxing week.

I went to Brisbane for the Redgate Seminar, and didn’t have much time there, but I came back to Sydney for the weekend. Unfortunately I was alone as my wife had to head home to get back to work on the ranch. I took a little time at the Sydney art Museum where I still couldn’t get away from horses.

I also saw a neat modern art repurpose of old tube televisions as a cello.

Lots of other interesting artwork there as well. I’m sure my kids were both jealous and annoyed with a lot of SMS pictures of my experience. I’m not usually a big art person, but it was raining and my daughter (a fine arts major in uni) has influenced me a bit, so I took a few hours to try and see the world from her perspective.

I also spent a few hours Sunday at the theater. I’d seen the billboards with my wife and I loved the movie as a kid, so I decided to try the musical. It was good, and I enjoyed the singing and the way they moved scenes (and songs) around to work on stage. Great performances, but I still like the movie better.

I’m also heading to Melbourne later this week, but I’m only there for about 45 hours, so not a lot of time to see anything. I spent a week there in 2019 and loved it. I hope to get back there with my wife sometime, perhaps on the way to Tasmania or Adelaide.

Now, back to work before the Redgate Seminar tomorrow.

May 5, 2024
The On-Call Load

For most of us working in technology, I think we understand that if something is broken we might need to work. Not that we have to, or we need to, but we might need to. Perhaps you feel differently, or your company approaches on-call in another way. If so, let me know today how you deal with staff being on-call.

In my career, there are jobs with formal on-call, informal on-call, or even no on-call. In the latter situation, there isn’t anyone who is prepared to handle issues outside of normal working hours, but that doesn’t mean if management calls you can ignore them. It’s that the organization didn’t expect issues. I worked in a small company (< 50 people), where we primarily had systems for people who worked in the office, and nothing was running at night (outside of backups). Normally no one knew if there was an issue overnight or on weekends, but I did get called by the owner when he went in one weekend and couldn’t receive a fax on our computer system. So I guess I was the emergency-on-call person.

In both large and small companies, I’ve had formal on-call situations where humans or automated systems would know I was assigned as the person to contact for issues. These might be 24-hour periods, weeks, or even a month at a time. In informal situations, usually, there was a list of technical people’s contact information and anyone needing help would just pick one and call, often based on who they thought could solve the problem.

For most of my career, being on-call hasn’t been a large burden. I’ve been interrupted during some events, dinners, or holidays, but relatively rarely. My wife and I have felt it wasn’t too burdensome, especially given compensation and other flexibility. At the same time, there have been some places where on-call is a disruption to my life. Usually, I’ve tried to leave those positions as quickly as I could, though that might take months.

I always ask about on-call responsibilities when I interview for positions. It’s not that the answer is a deciding factor, but it is a factor. If on-call is more demanding, I would ask for something in return: perhaps comp time, more salary, or some other flexibility.

What is your on-call situation? Is that acceptable to you? Have you never been called outside of working hours? Let me know today.

Steve Jones

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

May 3, 2024
A New Word: mcfeely

mcfeely – adj. inexplicably moved by predictable and well-worn sentiments, even if they are trite or obvious or being broadcast blindly to the masses.

I get mcfeely all the time. Recently I was listening to A Beautiful Life, from a movie by the same name. It’s a simple song, simple lyrics, but it creates a lot of emotion in me. It brings back memories of finding out my wife was pregnant with my daughter, of the early years when I put her to bed and read stories, of when she grew up and moved away for college.

Music often does this for me, as do movies/television or even a well written passage in a book. It could be joy, sadness, anger, or anything else. I enjoy the emotion of the situations I’ve escaped into.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

May 3, 2024
Deleting Stale Local Database Git Branches with SSMS–#SQLNewBlogger

I wrote a post recently about pruning branches in git. That’s part of the job, but the other part is removing local branches. This post looks at one way to do that in a semi-manual fashion.

This could be automated, but it took seconds, so I did a quick manual thing. I’ll work on an automated way, but since I do this rarely, manual is fine for me.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. You can see all posts on Git as well.

Getting a List of Branches to Delete

In the last post I showed how to get a list of branches with dry run. This was the image I showed of branches. If I re-run that without the dry run, the branches are removed.

The output is similar, but either set of output works. Once we have a list of branches, what do we do? Let’s use SSMS to help.

SSMS Makes This Easy

If I highlight the results of my git prune, I can copy/paste those into SSMS. You can see below I’ve done this, and then held the ALT+Shift key to select a bunch of text in a box. This is all the text apart from the branch names.

Once I’ve done this, I can let go of those keys and type “git branch –d “, which will replace the text on every line. You can see this below.

This is a great technique, and while it works in VSCode and some other editors, I usually have SSMS open and it works very well here. I then select all this text, paste it back into the CMD window, accept the note that this is a multi-line paste, and all my deletes run.

Voila, all remote branches deleted are removed from my local git install. A few of these were already removed manually as I experimented.

SQL New Blogger

As I mentioned in the previous post, version control skills (especially git) are core for most technology pros. DBA, developers, sysadmin, anyone working with modern software development or administration likely needs to know about version control.

This post was about 10 minutes. You could write this in 15 and showcase your tech skills to a future employer.

May 1, 2024