Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Prompt Engineer

    No, Redgate Software isn’t hiring for SQL Prompt. I’m sure quite a few of you depend on SQL Prompt and would like more engineers working on it. Maybe a few of you would find that an interesting piece of software to work on.

    Rather, a Prompt engineer is someone that works with AI, trying to get a system to produce better results. I can’t decide if this sounds like an interesting job that stretches your brain or the equivalent of a mediocre developer that just keeps copying something from Stack Overflow, hitting compile, getting an error, and repeating that cycle.

    I can picture a scientist using their voice to continually correct some AI system by saying “no, that’s not quite right. I want to see more blue” or some other type of guidance. Is this job the equivalent of raising a digital toddler?

    I actually found one of these jobs on Indeed.com. For a company in San Francisco, a hybrid position paying between US$175k-335k to help create steerable AI systems. I’m not entirely sure what this is, but at that pay rate, it is tempting to learn.

    I think AI systems are fascinating, especially for someone that has done some development and can see how difficult it would be to specify an algorithm that can handle some tasks. Like composing some prose result. Or suggesting code based on what you’ve typed. These are some handy features that have been added to some IDEs and services.

    GitHub CoPilot is interesting, and if you haven’t tried it, I think it helps Java/C#/app programmers. Go watch some videos or sign up for a trial. I am not sure about these helping us in database work. There is probably a little more work needed before an AI delivers help for your particular database issue. However, I’ll be testing and working with some tools to see what I think.

    If you are interested in AI and have a lot of patience to train models, and a lot of patience to work on data cleansing and loading, then maybe you can find a new career in AI. It might be a fad, but I don’t think it will ever go away, and I do think there will be a lot of opportunities in this space in the next decade.

    Note: If you find this interesting, I had a discussion recently with a few others in a webinar.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Dropping Career Goals for Q2

    I set goals at the beginning of 2023 for Q1. I didn’t do well, as my evaluation earlier this week has a D for my efforts.

    I’m re-evaluating things, and for now, I’ve decided not to set more goals for the time being.

    Why?

    One of the things I end my career presentations with is this: we work to live, not live to work. Find balance in your life, between your career and life.

    I truly believe that, and as I re-evaluated myself last week, I realized that I am out of balance. There have been some stressful things in life that have been hard on me, but more than the actual thing, it’s had an impact on my mental health. I’ve been a bit drained, so I haven’t wanted to take time to focus, preferring to relax a bit more with my wife, guitar, or a good book.

    I started to recognize this when I did my Feb update, but thought I could push through. I didn’t, or couldn’t, and while I appreciate the optimism, I realize that I don’t want to ignore the additional stress in my life.

    A Deliberate Pause

    I don’t want to let goals go, but I am going to ignore them for Q2 and focus on being kind to myself and recognizing I need balance here. I’ll revisit this in late June and see how I am doing then.

  • WIT Women Speakers Survey

    There is a survey from the WIT group for female speakers. If you are a woman and speak in front of groups, or used to, please fill it out.

    This is part of their efforts to help encourage more females to speak and support their efforts. I like the fact that they are reaching out to others to learn how women feel about speaking.

    If you know any women that speak, whether in the data community or elsewhere, please pass along the link.

  • Information Schema Strangeness

    There was a Slack thread at Redgate recently where a developer was showing some code where they decided to use the “extra” column from the information_schema.columns view. They were making decisions on how to detect certain metadata about a column based on the data in this column. Apparently, the data in here is overloaded for different options that might be set on a table.

    This caught my eye because I had no idea there was a column named “extra” in this view. I flipped over to SSMS and decided to check what was being stored in here. To my surprise, there was no “extra” column. As I dug in a little deeper in the thread, I realized the developer was talking about Information_schema.columns in a MySQL database.

    That was a surprise to me. While I know different platforms will add features and functionality to their databases, I thought the information_schema views were consistent across platforms. They should give you a set of information you can count on. Apparently, that’s not true. You can count on some things, but not all, which means that these aren’t consistent structures.

    Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It seems every product out there will extend the SQL “standard” where they see fit, adding features or functions that suit particular use cases. Commercial vendors do this for profit, and OSS projects likely do this because an individual wants a change. That has resulted in a wide variety of database platforms that meet different needs and solve different problems.

    It would be nice if we could write SQL code and be sure it would run on SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, or any platform. And in many cases, we can. Lots of basic queries are the same. However, what would be the point? I certainly don’t want more people in management wanting to switch from one platform to the other, just because they feel like it. I’d imagine that we’d thrash between platforms every time a senior developer or VP decided a system should run on their favorite platform.

    A base standard is good, like a base class in programming. However, they aren’t always as useful as they seem, and extending them to meet needs is better for us all. I don’t need a standard implementation of the SQL language or the information_schema views, it was just a surprise to realize that this actually how the platforms are coded.

    Note: If you find this interesting, I had a discussion recently with a few others in a webinar.

    Steve Jones

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