Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Paste Policy

    Most of the code I’ve written for various employers was something that lived inside the organization. This was for internal use and no one outside of the organization ever used it. It was almost always code I’d written, so I wasn’t ever worried about the provenance of the code (where it came from).

    However, I’m sure I’ve copied code from somewhere online and used that in some way. I might have taken this function from Jeff Moden and dropped it on a production server where it was used to process a string. I’m sure I’ve taken code from various places and used it in administrative functions, like Ginger’s code to manage a log file.

    I don’t know that any of those authors would have minded using their code. After all, that’s why many of us have written articles and published things at SQL Server Central. We are looking to help others grow their knowledge, as well as provide them short solutions they can incorporate into their own work. I assume most of the people answering questions at SQL Server Central or Stack Overflow feel the same way. Use the code.

    In this new age of AI, perhaps that’s OK, or perhaps it’s not. There is concern about who owns code and who has rights. At Redgate, we build software that’s sold and installed on other machines, so we have stricter guidelines. Our policy (in general) is “You MUST NOT include source code of unknown provenance in your application.” I saw a note recently that said this also applies to any AI-generated code, even if we provide the prompts.

    I doubt many organizations have policies about using code from the Internet, but I wonder if they should. Possibly there might be ownership or usage issues with AI code. If someone posts code on SSC that’s one thing, but getting code from an AI that might have been trained (and regurgitates) code that is not freely posted could be a problem.

    Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, in your corporate CRUD application or some DBA maintenance script, it’s unlikely anyone will be auditing the code for any sort of misuse or copyright infringement.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Republish: Abolish Disjointed Time

    I’m a little buried. Life has been crazy and I am out of town again. Actually traveling today, so I’m republishing Abolish Disjointed Time.

    I am still not happy with DST this past spring.

  • A New Word: Exulansis

    exulansis – n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it – whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness – which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

    I try to avoid exulansis in my verbal stories, but I know it doesn’t always work. I actually ran into this recently while traveling to a volleyball tournament as a coach. I wasn’t talking with a player, but rather a parent, talking a bit about my fatigue and challenges. On the 22nd of June, as I chatted about life, I realized I’d only been home for 7 days that month.

    This parent was a lawyer, primarily working in Denver and rarely traveling for work. They took vacations, but those tend to be spread out, where as this trip was my 4th of June. I realized as I tried to talk about the experience of crossing time zones and the world back and forth that this person couldn’t relate and my point was being busy and needing to catch up on chores, as well as dragging a bit at the tournament. The travel experiences across time zones weren’t really something that they could relate to.

    Interestingly enough, another parent heard and asked me for some tips, as they were about to embark on 3 cities in 3 weeks for work. They didn’t have exulansis from my story.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • HIPPO vs. Data

    One trend for many organizations is to be data-driven. This means using data to make decisions at all levels, or at least support those decisions. This was popularized by many companies, and there is research to back up the claims that those organizations who do this have more success, more revenue, more profitability, etc. Much like DevOps, however, it seems many organizations don’t want to actually invest in making data-driven decisions.

    Instead, many opt to make decisions by HIPPO. If you’ve never seen this acronym, it stands for highest paid person’s opinion. Many managers will defer to whoever is above them in the org chart, often someone that is paid more money than them. Even when there is data to make a different decision, the HIPPO is still used.

    It’s not just management. I sometimes see technical people do this. In that case, it might be the loudest or most senior person rather than the highest paid, but the sentiment is the same. Rather than using a lot of information, someone makes a decision based on what they want/see/need/desire. I’ve seen this often with tooling, where one person likes Jenkins (or hates it), and the organization changes from  (or to) Octopus Deploy or Bamboo for no real reason. Lately, it seems some people are advocating moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions because, well, I don’t know why. There’s not a good rational reason.

    The goal of collecting and using data is to do so intelligently and with purpose. And not just for big decisions, but for everyday actions. By senior managers and frontline people, to help guide a more efficient and effective company. This involves a lot of technical work, but also cultural change. We have to position data as a strategic and tactical asset that everyone shares and uses as the basis to make the entire organization better.

    Of course, these are similar to the concepts of DevOps. Let’s build software better. In practice, many attempts succeed initially but fail later as more and more groups fight individual incentives that promote one group’s goals over another’s. When silos aren’t broken down, we fall back into the same patterns.

    In this case, listening to (or lobbying) the HIPPO.

    Steve Jones

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