Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Corporate Wellness Day

    Today is the corporate Wellness Day at Redgate. It’s a day off for almost everyone in the company, unless they have something that can’t get moved. A few support people, a few others, like me, that are traveling. We, however, will get another day that we can take off.

    When we revamped benefits for 2023, one of the things that we wanted to encourage was health and wellness. We added a couple days off, like this company holiday and a birthday day off. We also reduced the ability for employees to get out of vacation by not buying back days and emphasizing that managers should ensure they work with people to take their entire allowance. We can carry over 5 days, but no more.

    I like the idea of this day off, as it means people take some time away and won’t come back to a bunch of emails or other things that people sent during their break. Instead, the company is essentially shutting down.

    I don’t mind missing today for travel. I’ve got things to do and I’m looking forward to working with a customer tomorrow. However, I also value my days off and I am looking to try and get a day later this week or next and get up to the mountains.

    Whether you think this is a good idea or not, I would hope you admit that it’s nice that the company is trying to ensure employee wellness. Last week had a number of meetings for Mental Health Awareness Week, and to cap off those efforts, we close today.

    I’ve never had a corporate closure like this as a benefit. I’m looking forward to next year and taking the day off with everyone else.

    I hope.

  • Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?

    The short answer is no.

    The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort.

    There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it’s impressive, I don’t know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the Top 5 Dream Dinner Guests. The tool isn’t that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends.

    I look at Ayende Rahien’s blog often, and he recently had some thoughts on this topic, experimenting with ChatGPT and coding. Some things worked; some didn’t. In general, to get good code, you still need a subject matter expert, which is also the case with humans. We have plenty of people writing code that aren’t great at their jobs. We do see a lot of bad code, but we also have some great coders that help others to learn or just refactor their code later.

    So is ChatGPT better than a below-average developer? I don’t know. While the tool will get better, one advantage with people is we can complain to them, or send them problem queries, and they’ll learn to paste better code in from the SQL Server Central forums or StackOverflow or somewhere else. Perhaps ChatGPT will learn, but will it learn to improve and refactor code? I’m not sure how easy it will be to teach the system to edit something rather than just produce new code.

    I do think that the assistance features of AI, suggesting ways to complete sentences or lines of code, can be very valuable. They are a great productivity tool that can enhance your ability to get work done. If they learn to work in your style, suggesting the things you’ve done in the past, then these tools will help. As with most tools, they aren’t a replacement for your knowledge, but merely a lever to make you more efficient.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 27 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to tell a loved one about the strengths you see in them.

    For one of my kids, I’m letting them know that I see:

    • responsibility for meeting their commitments
    • independence in making their own decisions
    • accountability for their decisions
    • strong willed to drive themselves to accomplish more than they have to
    • compassion for others

    I’m proud of all my kids, and I took time to let one of them know.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • EV Myths

    I ran across an article on EV myths, this I thought was interesting. The myths are things that I see in comments on all sorts of articles or hear from people. They are:

    1. EVs take forever to recharge
    2. EVs can’t travel far
    3. EVs are slow
    4. EVs are unreliable
    5. EVs are super expensive

    I haven’t experienced any of these, with my EV charging fairly quickly, I go up to ski in mine, it’s fast (perhaps too fast), it always works, and it’s in line with luxury cars.

    The last one gave me pause, because my Model Y was the most expensive car I’ve every bought. It actually bothered me for months in the summer of 2021 until my wife got me to sit down and think rationally about it.

    The car is a $55-60k car. That is pricey, and not for everyone, but it’s in line with a petrol car from BMW, Audi, Mercedes, etc. Most of the other EVs, Polestar, Ionic, etc. are similarly priced. The basic Model 3 is in the 40s.

    Pricey, but not crazy.

    The high end Teslas (X and S) are like a high end 911 or BMW.

    I’ve had no maintenance in my model Y in 17 months. I’ve had it always charged when I start the day, so I almost never need to charge during the day. The times we’ve had to charge during the day (our summer trip in the mountains), the time was more than gas, but not much more than a pit stop for coffee and the bathroom.

    There was another article from the Atlantic, which I’ve seen reposted a few times as they are supposedly a world class, trustworthy journalism site. I think they are, but they harp on costs, which are like other cars. They can get high quickly. I agree that starting the Ford F150 around $50k but quickly going to $80 isn’t great, but it does give options to others.

    From what I’ve learned in a year and a half, the vast majority of the time, 95%+, I got less than 120 miles in a day. I could likely live with a 200-220mi range car. YMMV, but it really depends on you doing a little work to understand how you drive, how often, and how the car sits. There are days we go 250miles and need to charge, but that’s rare.

    Honestly, the more I drive the car, the more it’s just a car. The exception is longer trips, in which case, then my driving becomes like a trip through Wyoming or Montana with a diesel vehicle. I do a little planning.