Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 20 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to appreciate the good qualities of someone in your life.

    We have a person in Redgate that does a lot of work to support our sales process. This individual has been a force for producing resources that many people, including myself use.

    I don’t want to name them publicly, but I really appreciate the work ethic, the flexibility, the willingness to learn, to admin mistakes, to go the extra mile, the friendliness, and the enthusiasm.

    There’s more, but these are the top ones I appreciate.

    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 17 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to support a local business with a positive online review or friendly message.

    When I discover a business I like or one that delivers value or joy, I have been trying to leave a review or message online. This is how many people find new businesses, and the local ones can always use support.

    Santortas is a local restaurant near me that I love. Their breakfast burritos are amazing. My only complaint is they don’t open until 9, so it’s mostly a weekend treat for me. I wish I could get one at 7 when I go skiing. I left them a review on Google.

    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.

  • The Tesla Dashcam

    I was driving home from the mountains recently and witnessed an accident. I have proof.

    This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

    The Dashcam

    The Tesla Model Y (and all models) has a number of cameras built into the system. This is recording all the time, and if you use the USB they give you (or buy another), you have the clips saved for the future. I bought a USB drive, and it’s been in the car recording when I drive. I sometimes use it when parking, but often not since that drains the battery as the car can’t sleep.

    While driving home, I was slowing as I came to a red light. I saw two cars cross in front, getting ready to turn left in front of me. One accelerated, right in front of a car coming from my left.

    The car going South, from my left, likely didn’t see the turning car as there were two cars stacked up to turn. The result is below, with a collision.

    I haven’t been contacted by the police or insurance as of yet, but if they call, I’ve got video.

    I like that this is built in. With modern cars having all sorts of computer tech in there, and cameras relatively cheap, I’d really expect that more manufacturers would put these in their offerings in the next few years. Or insurance companies would ask for them.

    One annoying thing is the UI in the Tesla for viewing these is really slow to read the SSD and pull them up. Grabbing this out of the car and plugging into my computer let me pull off the video in a minute or two.

    The hard part then is remembering to put the SSD back into the car 😉

  • Building Recommended Software Practices

    Many of us work inside an organization that has a process for building and deploying software. We may find our org doing this well, or we may feel our process is poor with lots of room for improvement.

    A lot of the discussion around how to be better at building software in the last ten years has been around the philosophy of DevOps. This concept doesn’t really prescribe how to build software, but give you goals to aim for. That means you still need to take the ideas of flow, feedback, and learning and decide how you implement them with your staff. What practices do you follow to ensure you can deploy quickly anytime your code is done? These can include ensuring you’ve tested code, getting feedback from customers, and more.

    I ran across a post on recommended software engineering practices for an organization. The list includes seven things you should do:

    1. Keep documentation in the code repo
    2. Have a mechanism for test data creation
    3. Use rock solid database migrations
    4. Create templates for new projects
    5. Automate code formatting
    6. Automate a process for new dev environments
    7. Automate preview environments

    This is a set of things I often preach to customers as well, especially 2, 3, 6, and 7. I often focus on the database and having curated test data, migrations you can count on and easy setup is important. And, of course, with SQL Prompt, you don’t need formatting ;). Just kidding, that’s important, too.

    These are solid practices, and none of them are that hard to set up, but they do require some discipline and willingness to work as a team and maintain your process across time. Each of these items needs some care and feeding across time to remain relevant and helpful to your staff.

    Do you have good software engineering practices? Are you proud of them and would you bring them to a new position? Or perhaps you wish your team would adopt better habits and a different mentality towards building software.

    Steve Jones

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