Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 8 Mar 2023

    Today’s coping tip is ask someone how their day is going and really listen to them.

    I had the chance to do this with one of the kids I coach recently. This athlete seemed a little distracted and annoyed by things, without great body language one day. It wasn’t busy, so I asked a few questions, wanting to know about this person, what was good, bad, what went well, not well, what was bothering them.

    Not a deep discussion, but one where I could listen to them, express sympathies, but not solve their issues.

    I enjoy getting to know someone I care about better, even when I can’t do anything for them at the moment.

    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 7 Mar 2023

    Today’s coping tip is give positive comments to as many people as possible today.

    On a travel day, I made an effort here. Those are always better for me, when I see a lot of people and can brighten their days.

    • Thanking the bus driver at the airport
    • Greeting the cashier at my favorite restaurant kindly
    • Complementing the flight attendants on their look and service
    • Chatting with the Uber driver and expressing gratitude for recommendations
    • Taking a few minutes with the hotel receptionist
    • Being positive and thanking a waiter at a restaurant

    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.

  • Nested Transactions

    One of the very common expectations from many SQL developers involves transactions. Many developers (database or application developers) think they can open a transaction, do something, open an inner transaction (nested), and then commit or rollback the inner transaction separate from the outer one.

    If you’ve worked with explicit transactions and experimented with this a bit, then you know that this doesn’t work. Recently Brent Ozar wrote a post on this as he had a client think that committing the inner transaction would release locks. It doesn’t.

    Knowing whether work gets committed or not is important to data integrity. We often need to ensure that multiple things happen or nothing happens. That’s key, and if we want to decide that thing A can happen without thing B, those are two transactions. In most cases, where we’d want the behavior I described at the top, these don’t need to be nested. They’re just two transactions.

    Understanding how data modifications work is important, especially if you work across different platforms and you need to ensure there is some level of durability. Some platforms use different locking strategies, some limit transactions even more, and digging into the details is important.

    As technical people, we know there are many ways to solve problems, and we often spend a lot of time ensuring that users of our systems have options. We would assume our users will learn and understand how the options work, which is no different that what we ought to do ourselves. Don’t assume. Ensure you know how the database will behave if you depend on it behaving a certain way.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 6 Mar 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to make plans with a friend and catch up with them.

    I decided to reach out to a friend and make time to catch up. This is someone I’ve known a long time and really appreciate in my life, but I let time get away from me and don’t always make time.

    I set up a lunch and we had the chance to catch up on our lives, family, etc. It went well, though a bit short as I had some meetings in the early afternoon. We did, however, set up a second lunch to meet again in a few weeks.

    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.