Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Flying Halfway Around the World to Australia

    I leave tonight for Australia. I was in London 3 days ago, so this will complete my halfway around the world trip when I time travel tomorrow and skip Tuesday. I’ll arrive in Sydney on Wednesday morning.

    I am very lucky and I appreciate the chance to go back down under for work. I have a few seminars I’d delivering with fellow Redgaters, MVPs, industry experts, and Octopus Deploy engineers. I’ll be busy these days:

    That’s next week, but I’m heading down early to recharge a bit. My wife is traveling with me to Sydney, where we’ll spend a few days later this week. She’s never been to that city, and I have literally been there for about 53 hours. We’re looking forward to some sightseeing, hiking around, and enjoying the Australian hospitality.

    We’ll also take a few days in Brisbane before I go to work, checking out the Gold Coast and seeing a few friends. I’m looking forward to going back, as I enjoyed 4 days there before the pandemic.

    This should be a good break from work before a busy week. I’ll be lightly blogging a few things, but mostly enjoying this break on the other side of the world.

  • Seagull Management

    Last year, I read Surrender, a book by U2 lead singer, Bono. Bill Gates listed this as one of the top books to read at one point, so I picked it up and dove in. I have enjoyed U2s music since I was in high school, and was interested to hear what made Bill Gates recommend his book. The book is partially a journey of U2, but mostly a look at how Bono’s view of the world and life has changed over time.

    Bono grew beyond music in his life to become an activist and try to shape the world into a better place. Whether you agree with his efforts or focus or not, it’s admirable that he has tried to be more than a rich and famous singer. He’s had to build more skills around how to communicate with others, convince them to take a course of action, and educate himself about the world. In trying to build these skills, he’s founded or worked in organizations around his time with U2.

    As a part of that, he had a great quote about leaders who are busy elsewhere but try to be involved in different parts of the business. He called this seagull management, and it was something he tried to avoid doing as he only comes into the office periodically.

    Seagull management is where you fly into the office, shit over what everyone is doing, and fly off again. I wonder how many people in management do this but think that they are motivating, helping, or improving their workers’ efforts. Trying to bring their view, experience, knowledge, etc. to others, but invariably doing so in a way that doesn’t resonate with workers. Perhaps it’s not even helpful if management hasn’t taken the time to understand why people are working in a certain way.

    I also see this with technical leads or senior engineers who come into a situation, often with strong opinions. They might express how they would have coded or architected something completely differently. Perhaps even informing existing staff that they are doing something wrong. Whether good intentioned or not, seagull management doesn’t help improve any situation.

    We make bad decisions, we may build something without considering all the information, or perhaps the situation changes. We all find ourselves in situations where the technology doesn’t seem to be well matched to the environment. We might wish things were different. However, no matter how we arrive at our present situation, we are there. Extracting ourselves from any legacy environment takes time and has to be a journey that is undertaken with support from both technical staff and management.

    Most of us want to build great systems that work well for our clients and are admired by others. We rarely find ourselves in a place where we have the time and resources to do that. We can refactor, evolve, and grow our systems to be better, but it does take time. We need a goal, direction, support, and understanding that change is a journey, not something that a manager can fix on their rare visits to our environment.

    Steve Jones

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

  • A New Word: Apolytus

    apolytus– n. the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin, already able to twist back around and chuckle at this weirdly antiquated caricature of yourself that will soon come off completely.

    I don’t know if I am changing that much, though hopefully I’m still maturing a bit. More, I think about my daughter, who graduates college this year. She’s changed so much in the five years since she left home for college, outgrowing the problems and concerns she had as an 18-year old.

    I think I went through that myself, leaving home at 17 for college, coming back 4 years later a completely different person, viewing the world completely differently.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Using Git Prune–#SQLNewBlogger

    As I’ve been working with SQL Saturday and managing changes to events, I’ve accumulated a lot of branches. Even though I’m a solo developer, I decided to use branches, as I expect others to share this load in the future. This post looks at how to start cleaning those up.

    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.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    Finding Old Branches

    When I ran the git branch command, I saw this. There are a lot of old branches in there.

    2024-04-11 10_44_53-cmd

    I decided that I should reduce this number. After all, even removing stale branches means I have a lot of events in flight.

    We use GitHub, and when I go on the site, I see lots of branches, some of which date back to last year. Those events are done, so I decided to delete some branches. In the image below, there are three branches. To the right, there are delete icons on the bottom two as I’ve already pressed the one to delete the remote branch on the top one.

    2024-04-11 10_51_00-Branches · sqlsaturday_sqlsatwebsite — Mozilla Firefox

    Now, how do I delete the local branch? Let’s start by removing it.

    Git Prune

    There is a command to remove references to remote branches that are deleted: git prune. I deleted a few older branches, and then ran git prune for remotes, with the –dry-run option. This tells me what would happen. As you can see, a number of branch references would be deleted.

    2024-04-11 10_51_57-cmd

    Nothing in here I’m worried about or that is active. I’ve deleted these on GitHub, so I’ll re-run the command without dry run. This removes the references.

    Unfortunately, the local branches still exist. We don’t remove these, as it’s possible I have work on a local branch not sent to the remote, so doing this automatically, even if I do it, is dangerous.

    I’ll do another post on removing the local branches.

    Automating the Removal of Remote references

    I might want to remove local references for branches that get deleted on the remote. This is useful if you delete branches on merge. I don’t in this case, as I’m often using the same branch for multiple changes for an event, rather than a new branch for every one.

    One way to do this is to change the config with this: 

    git config remote.origin.prune true

    This will then run the prune on each fetch or full. This helps keep things cleaner, though local branches still exist. However, if I commit to a local branch and push, I’ll get an error that I need to configure the upstream. That helps with me being aware of what’s active or not.

    SQL New Blogger

    Using version control is a core skill for anyone in technology. Even database people. You could write posts on how you use or learn about git (or something else) and showcase your skills.

    This post took me about 15 minutes to write, even with screen shots.