Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Top 5 Technologists

    There’s a common party question about which 5 people would you invite to a dinner party? Often this is amended to include living or dead people, and it’s often interesting to hear people tell you who they’d invite and why.

    Since most of the people reading this work in technology in some way, I was wondering who you would invite to a party that’s related to technology. Living or dead, however tangential, is there a list you can come up with?

    I’ll give you my list and then a few thoughts. For the list, I’ll say Steve Wozniak, Sal Khan, Reed Hastings, Gladys West, and Lawrence Lessig. Maybe not all technologists per se, but all had an influence on my life using technology.

    Steve Wozniak because he was a geek hero and he seems like a fun person. Someone that enjoys technology. I had an Apple II early on and always wanted to meet him.

    Salman Khan because I think his use of technology to teach others, for free, was incredible. Education is something that’s a big part of my life, and I appreciated his lessons helping my kids at times. I think someone that sees the world in this way would be a great conversationalist.

    Reed Hastings has been an incredible businessman in the tech world. He founded Pure Software and Netflix, and has been on the boards of Microsoft and Facebook. He has had an influence on education efforts in California. I would love to listen to him talk about business and technology.

    Gladys West is a mathematician who worked on a number of topics that built computer models for submarines and analyzing satellite data. She has had quite an influence on the GPS system many of us use every day in our phones. I’d love to know what it was like for someone like her to work and grow in our field.

    Not least, just last. Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law, and someone that has worked hard to ensure our legal world better represents fairness and ethics in technology. I’ve read a number of his books and would be interested in talking about how we ought to view the digital world from a fair rights perspective.

    That’s my list. What’s yours?

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 24 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to be gentle with someone you feel inclined to criticize.

    It’s very easy, and maybe very human, to start to criticize others for doing something we wouldn’t do, or at least, something we don’t think we’d do. I sometimes wonder if we are much more likely to do this with people close to us than those we know less well.

    My kids are adults now, and they are in charge of their own lives. They make mistakes, as I do, and there are times that I want to point out they could do better, or take other advice, or something else.

    I am learning not to do that. One of my kids did something that cost them more money than they expected. They were upset, and it would have been easy for me to criticize the action. Instead, I have been working on being sympathetic, listening, and asking what they think or what they do. Let them work through it without me trying to solve the problem, take responsibility, or criticize.

    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.

  • Daily Coping 23 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to give sincere compliments today to people.

    A tough day recently coaching, but I kept this in mind. Complementing parents, competitors and fellow coaches, and even my kids. All while not having things go our way.

    It was tough, but I was working to find something good to say about a variety of people.

    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.

  • A Test Client for Zero Downtime Deployments

    I’ll be at VS Live in Las Vegas this March to discuss zero downtime deployments. If you want to come and join me for this session, or any of the other great ones, register today and save $500 with the promo code “Jones”. You can use this link to register.

    To simulate the effects of deployments on a workload, I built a small client. It’s nothing great, and likely some of you will laugh at my C# skills, but it works well enough. It’s a simple Windows form application that writes to a text box. However, it’s valuable to determine if there are any issues when you’ve made a deployment.

    This post looks at the rough design of the client. Code is available in this repo: https://github.com/way0utwest/ZeroDowntime

    Using WPF

    I wrote a small app a few years ago to test and present on Always Encrypted. This was a basic WPF app that added the proper values to the connection string for Always Encrypted and let you query encrypted data (or not).

    Like all mediocre developers, I copied and pasted that project into a new folder and set about modifying it. In this case, I set up a loop that continues to run and execute some database code, essentially using this loop:

    while (iRunQuery > 0)
    
{

    I set this value to 0 initially, and when a button is clicked, it’s 1. This then runs a bunch of lines to decide which DB code to run. I’ve mostly made this stored procedures to make it easier to adjust demos without touching C# code.

    It’s not pretty.

    At the bottom, I have this (outside the loop)

    Application.DoEvents();
    
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);

    This is designed to catch me clicking a “stop” button that will set the variable back to 0. I added the delay because otherwise this runs a bit fast.

    I have a few option buttons that adjust what code I’m calling, so I can simulate toggling feature flags on and off. I also log results to a window so you can see them, and I catch errors and log those. Errors are also counted, so we can see the impact of “non zero-downtime” changes.

    It’s not a great example of software, but it does work.