Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Autonomous Driving Around London

    There’s a video of Bill Gates taking a drive in an autonomous car around London. I’ve been to London dozens of times, ridden and cabs and Ubers, and even driven a few times. It’s a crazy environment, and I struggle to process everything as a human. This is certainly a challenge for a car.

    It’s not a Tesla. In fact, I don’t see many Tesla FSD (full self driving) videos in the UK. I know they don’t have all the updates the US gets, but I struggled to find any actually in London. A few that looked like they were close to London aborted in city driving.

    In any case, this is a neat video, and if you look at all the things happening, as a driver, you can see the complexity of navigating around London. Imagine programming this.

    If the video doesn’t tender, the URL is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruKJCiAOmfg&w=560&h=315

    This is a car from Wayve, and it is impressive. Not the car, but the driving and control are something. It’s something I’d like to experience, since I could imagine this being a very neat thing in witness. Certainly would be better than the Uber I took in Las Vegas a few years ago.

    They’re hiring. Not for me, but maybe for you.

  • Building a Better Profile

    I give talks on branding and managing your career at various events. Often I am helping people to better market and sell themselves if find new opportunities. One area that I talk about for data professionals is the online profile. I think having one is important, especially as many of our contacts with potential employers are made digitally.

    I ran across an article that focuses on LinkedIn, specifically the profile you create there. It has some thoughts on recommendations, accomplishments, certifications, and more. I like the thoughts, and I do think they help showcase who you are as a professional working in some field. It is worth reading through the article and adjusting your profile to include these items.

    I’d guess that most people don’t have these things to add. They might have friends who will write a recommendation, but what about classes, certifications, projects, etc? Getting those is real work, and it’s an investment of time and effort to grow your abilities.

    Having a full (or fuller) profile helps you stand out. It helps give hiring managers confidence that you are a person who can do the job they need. Getting this full profile, however, is something you need to do over time. Invest in your skills and showcase this in your profile.

    One easy way to do this is to take the work you do and document it. Write blogs, share posts, create an ongoing commentary of what you do at work. When you feel proud of something you’ve done, find a way to add it to your profile. This will create the impression that you are getting things done and solving problems at work.

    I’m sure all of you do this. Take a little time and ensure the next person that might consider hiring you, or the person you want to hire you, knows this as well. It can be easy to talk about these things in an interview, but you need to get the interview first. Your resume/CV and profile are how you get the interview, so be sure you are taking care of them across time.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Being Responsible for Data

    For much of my career, I’ve run SQL Server Central. A large part of the popularity of the site is from the forums, where people can pose questions about their struggles with SQL Server and get answers from the community. There are also some off-topic forums, where people discuss various things outside of databases. In here, we have discussions a about life, sports, and more. While we do expect people to maintain an air of professionalism and respect others, we don’t try to moderate content.

    That’s how much of the Internet has worked, with various sites allowing users to post content, but not having any responsibility for what has been posted. The liability for that lies with the person doing the posting, which creates a thorny issue when users post anonymously. Setting that aside, I’ve been a proponent of this, not believing that Facebook or LinkedIn, or SQL Server Central ought to be liable for what users write and post. I do thinks users bear that responsibility.

    However, in the US, there is a Supreme Court case that may change our view, and that of many others. This case deals not with the data itself, but rather the algorithms that might display or recommend some of that data to others. That’s an interesting approach to the case law that has shielded many tech companies from their users’ poor behavior. Essentially the plaintiffs argue that Google and Twitter bear responsibility for their algorithms, which in this case aided terrorist recruitment. Meaning that the code they wrote to analyze data, essentially the queries that promoted content to users, were harmful.

    There are four possibilities listed in the article for what could happen, and I find them fascinating from a data analysis standpoint. Essentially a ruling against tech companies could shape how many of these companies process data in the future. While we might like to ensure these companies do not promote harmful content, think about this from the data analysis view? Do you want these companies to moderating how they provide results? Would this mean that we need to more carefully craft our search terms? In the context of tremendous floods of information, we often depend on Google, Bing, or some search algorithm to distinguish among the various meanings of words to bring back results relevant to us. At the same time, we might wish that everyone got the same results from the same search terms.

    Separate from the results, what about related results, or suggested items that might be related. I find the quality of these can vary for me, but often there is something “sponsored” or “I might like” that is helpful to me. Or just interesting. The infinite scrolling that many people live, getting similar recommendations is a double edged sword. It can increase learning, pleasure, etc. It can also send someone down a rabbit hole of anger and reinforcement of negative emotions. I think this also is one way that the content of the Internet creates division and disagreement among many.

    While I think users are responsible for their words, I also think that the way that these companies recommend and showcase content likely bears some responsibility. At the same time, I can’t imagine how you regulate this, and I do not want to see a constant battle of lawsuits over how we interpret rules. The sex, drugs, and rock and roll issues of the past, where we tried to legislate morality, didn’t work well. I don’t want to see that again.

    There isn’t a good answer here for me, and of the four possibilities, I fall somewhere between two and three. Some changes to section 230 (the legal writing) but not heavy changes or an abandonment of the way this has been interpreted. What do you think? Should we start to hold companies responsible for how they present content? I don’t know I worry for SQL Server Central, but it might change other sites. For us, we just show things from the last 24 hours. It’s not much of an algorithm, but it is one that likely isn’t going to get us sued.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Capturing Data Changes

    While working with a customer recently, I saw some code from them that used the OUTPUT and INTO clauses of an UPDATE statement to capture the changes made into another table. In this case, as users updated code strings in a table used in dynamic SQL, the developers wanted to capture the history of those changes in another table, giving them a rollback strategy if there were problems. This is an interesting, and focused way of auditing data changes, albeit with the work to write this code and control updates through stored procedures.

    This is one way of tracking the history of data values in many database platforms. Temporal tables are another, and we have CDC/Change Capture available in SQL Server. In the past, many people have used triggers. All of these work, with various pros and cons. In many cases, I have seen triggers used, often because many developers know how to write them and they are easy to create. Easy to get wrong as well.

    However, triggers take some work, while platforms have often built capabilities that make it easy to capture data changes and track them. Many developers often aren’t aware of these features, or haven’t spent sufficient time with them to know how to work with them or if these features even work well. This is one reason many of us write about new features, to learn about them, experiment, and help others to understand how to use them. Of course, not all features turn out to be as great as marketed.

    Today I wonder how you capture changes and audit them. Do you use triggers? Something built in? For limited auditing, and with control of the code, would you use the OUTPUT clause with your insert/update/delete code? Actually, I wonder how many of you would even consider this for limited auditing, especially with the large number of tools and frameworks that might generate their own UPDATE statement rather than call a stored procedure where you control the code. Or do you think this isn’t a good way to capture this data.

    Steve Jones