Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A New Word: Idlewild

    idlewild – adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything, which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to, even if it’s just flickering your eyes across the passing landscape.

    I get to do this regularly. I’m often stranded in planes, trains, cars, etc. where I can’t do anything. Even in airports. Certainly I could work in some of those situations, but I also recognize the fatigue I feel and the need to relax and try to take care of myself.

    The drive from LHR to Cambridge is a little over 2 hours (sometimes more). When I get a car, and I’m not too tired, I can sit and watch the world go by. Sometimes thinking of things, sometimes letting thoughts just flip through my head.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Things I Carry in My Travel Bag

    A friend asked me for some travel tips and ideas recently. One of their questions was on what types of things do I actually carry on the road, both for work and personal trips. Since I travel a lot, 18 trips so far this year, I decided to list out a few products that I’ve found helpful and why.

    One thing to note is that these are things permanently in suitcases or laptop/backups. I have separate items at home and never mix the two. That’s a good way to inconvenience myself somewhere.

    Cables and Adapters

    Number one for me are multiple cables and adapters. Many of us live with devices and keeping them charged when you’re busy and moving can be a challenge. Here’s a few things I keep around:

    • USB A and C Fast Charger – I started carrying two of these around since modern devices use lots of power. I keep one in my carry on and one in my roller, so they’re handy if I’m in a hotel, gym, or a convention center.
    • USB-C cables – I’ve found these long ones to work well. I have multiple ones, usually 3 foot and 10 foot lengths in my carry one and a 3ft and a 1ft one in my carry on. I find these die periodically, so I keep spares in bags. Home has separate cables
    • Garmin Watch charger – I have a Garmin, and this is a weird cable, so I have one at home and one in my carry on. My wife has a Samsung one and I’d certainly keep a spare Apply Watch charger around if I used that brand.
    • Worldwide power adapter – I’ve used a few iterations of these over the years. Not sure if it’s always this brand, but I’ve used this style for nearly 10 years. It’s been great to be able to plug in multiple things. In airports, I’ve even gotten someone to let me have the plug and they can plug into my adapter along with me.
    • Power Banks – I carry two. I used to have a third, but I gave this one to my wife. She loves it. Now I have one of these large Anker ones and a credit card sized one. The big one is for airplanes or airports or anywhere I can set it down. Handy when power plugs in planes don’t work or I’m at some event. The credit card one I carry in my pants, and it’s small and light and doesn’t bug me. It also doesn’t do a lot of charging, but it’s for emergencies.

    Clothes

    I’m a casual traveler, and I don’t need to worry about slacks and suits. However, I do often find myself away for multiple days, and I want packing simple, so I have a couple things.

    • laundry bag – I usually try to just pack what I need, but sometimes I have extra clothes. This is a great bag that lets me stuff worn (or sweaty) stuff into a separate bag. Plus, if I do laundry on the road, it’s handy to carry clothes around outside a suitcase.
    • packing cubes – The jury is out if I want more of these, but I got these three small ones. I carry two permanently in my suitcase and stuff one with socks and one with underwear. It keeps those small items together and easy to access. I pull these out in hotels and set them in a drawer, quickly letting me store them and access them.
    • clear toiletry bags – One of my best tips is to keep the health and beauty stuff you need in your suitcase. At least if you travel more than a few times a year. I can’t tell you how often I’ve forgotten something I need. I keep two of these in my bag: one for wet things, one for dry. Wet is contact solution, spare contacts, tooth brush, toothpaste and shampoo (wrap that in a zip lock). Dry is my razor, deodorant, electric razor, batteries, nail clippers, etc. Easy to grab these and drop them in a hotel bathroom and easy to pack them up and put them in my suitcase.
    • gloves – I never know if the weather in a remote city might be unpredictable, so I carry gloves, just in case. I have these, but pick your favorite pair and leave some in your bag.
    • hat – I don’t have this specific one, but I keep a couple in my bags, usually one in the carry on and one in the roller. I’m lacking hair, so I find I need these if it’s colder than expected. In the past, I’ve usually purchased one of these on a trip, so I carry a Norway one in my laptop bag and an Alaska one in my roller. Usually I’ve stuffed a UVA one in a jacket as my Mom has gotten me a few of these.
    • Windbreaker – I keep one like this in my roller, in one of the front pockets. Handy if I’ve forgotten a jacket, or it’s rainy.
    • Umbrella – I have a Redgate one, but I think a small one is helpful to have to cover yourself, your gear, or a friend.

    Misc

    These are random things I tend to keep with me.

    • notebook and pen – any old notebook for me, but Andy and my daughter like Moleskin. A few pens as I find taking notes to be easier on paper and it helps me remember. I don’t take a lot of notes on the computer when I’m doing something in person.
    • swim goggles, towel, and swimsuit – Pick your spare suit and add it. I don’t often use a pool or hot tub, but I do sometimes swim when I’m near the ocean or a big pool. Laps are relaxing to me and I’ve swum outside at the Rose Bowl and Jesus Green. The towel is also handy if I need one, especially in a cheaper hotel where their things might not be clean (ugh).
    • medicine – It can be hard to find meds on the road. I keep Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen with my for pain. Benedryl of allergies act up, Pepto Bismol tablets for my stomach, and dayquil/nyquil in case I feel sick. It can be surprisingly hard to find these things on the road. Sometimes availability, sometimes because I don’t have time, sometimes because I’m in a foreign land.
    • currency – I still run into places that don’t, or don’t want to, take credit. It’s fewer and fewer places, but it happens. I try to keep currency in my wallet for the places I go. That means US Dollars, Euros, Pounds, and I randomly have Kronor, HK dollars, AUS dollars, and NZ dollars. A few rupees as well. Usually $20-50 of local money. I keep a couple change purses to separate out UK and EU money.
    • Readers – I am getting blind as I age. I can’t see with my contacts anything on paper and not much on my phone. I like these travel ones.
    • sunglasses – I love Shady Rays and with the hardcase in my Everki bag, I keep a pair there, as well as separate ones in each car and one for chores. Free replacements if they break, which I’ve needed a few times.
    • bottle opener – I use Redgate ones, but they’re like these. It’s come in handy if I grab a soda or beer to relax in my room and they don’t have any openers.
    • water bottle – I got an aluminum one as a gift and I carry it. I try to avoid the plastic ones now and reduce the waste I generate. Choose one that fits in your bag. I like the Contigo ones.
    • snacks – I’m partial to Power Crunch bars (right now) and peanut butter packets. I find airlines sometimes don’t have food, or what I want, or they’re delayed. I try to keep food with me, just in case. I’ve found myself saved by these things during long delays, or when I’m stuck somewhere that isn’t serving food.

    There’s likely other stuff that I have in my bag. I need to give it a cleaning, and remove things I don’t need. However, this is the major list of things that I try to ensure are with my on every trip.

    If you have your own things, let me know.

  • Finding Identity Columns–#SQLNewBlogger

    I had to find a set of identity columns recently and through this would make a good blog post.

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

    Getting a List of Tables and Columns with Identity Properties

    Finding out which tables have an identity isn’t very easy, especially in SSMS’s Object Explorer. This property is somewhat hidden, which is annoying to me as I use them often. However, I get this is just a property.

    This is, however, stored in sys.columns.is_identity. This is set to 1 if the property is set, so filtering on this is good thing. If we join to sys.columns on object_id, we can get a list of table names.

    Here’s a short script to do this.

    SELECT
   o.name AS TableName
, columns.name AS ColumnName
, is_identity
FROM
   sys.columns
   INNER JOIN sys.objects AS o
     ON o.object_id = columns.object_id
WHERE sys.columns.is_identity = 1;

    However, there’s an easier way. There is a sys.identity_columns view which inherits from sys.columns and does the filtering for you. You can use this code instead.

    SELECT
  o.name AS TableName
, columns.name AS ColumnName
, is_identity
FROM
  sys.identity_columns AS columns
  INNER JOIN sys.objects AS o
    ON o.object_id = columns.object_id

    SQL New Blogger

    I had to do this as a quick test for a client that wanted to do some checking of identity seeds. They asked for a list of tables to check, and I showed them how to get this quickly.

    This was literally about 2 minutes to set up and about 5 minutes to write this post. Something you could easily do.

  • Constitutional AI

    I will admit that I don’t know a lot about AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems and how they are built. I’ve been playing with them a bit and haven’t been overly impressed with the results. I think some of this is that the my work is creative and I’m both used to being creative and I find the AIs less creative. And less accurate. And require a lot of editing. I don’t mind editing, but not if it takes longer than just writing things myself.

    From my understanding, a lot of the models behind AI systems (chatbots, recommenders, etc.) are built with humans giving them feedback on their responses in what’s known as RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). Essentially paid (often low paid) people that help to “guide” the AI into responses that are useful.

    I don’t quite know how that looks, and I certainly don’t want a job doing that. Definitely not if it’s looking at a lot of UIs like the one in this article. Can you imagine being paid to read things like this and then try to rank them? I can’t imagine they keep getting great input from evaluators across the day. Maybe 9am-10am, but I’d bet the 4pm-5pm responses are quick clicks.

    There was an article about a company trying something different: constitutional AI training. There’s a better description on the Anthropic website. It seems in this case they are creating some principles and limited human feedback, but then relying on an AI to give feedback to another AI? Or itself? I have to admit that I’m not completely sure of what happens here.

    Ultimately, I like the idea here, but I think the idea of a single LLM/AI model that suits every situation, or one that works in every geography doesn’t make sense. We have different thoughts among people and different cultures all over the world. I’d expect that we might have different types of AIs in different situations or environments. The one that helps decide how to deal with nuclear safety likely needs to be different from the one governing traffic signals. I certainly don’t want one TruthGPT to be the one true voice on all things.

    The idea of AI systems, assistants and more seems  complex and more strange than anything I’d have imagined from reading science fiction. As with many things, the reality is far different from the speculation I’ve had about how I would respond or want a system to behave. I think that’s the nature of science fiction; it picks specific situations and tailors the story to fit. The real world is much more messy.

    I don’t know where we go, but I’m curious as many of you have had more exposure to AI. Is it helping? Hurting? Useful? Are you excited or worried for the future? I’m curious what you think, mostly because I’m not sure what I think.

    Steve Jones

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