Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 15 Nov 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to sign up to try a new activity, course, or community.

    I somewhat did this early in the fall by choosing to go through the Head Coach certification for volleyball. While I’ve been in and out of it, November is normally when I begin coaching, but we’ve slowed things this year. This means I’ve had more time to go through a formal set of topics, growing my knowledge.

    I’ve considered adding something else, but I also know that coping means I need to take care of myself. I’m quite busy now, so I won’t add anything else for the time being.

    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 Importance of New Speakers–#NewStarNovember

    Many of us have learned how to research and get new information online. I certainly think the written word, whether from formal articles at places like SQL Server Central or from an individual’s blog, is very important to many of us looking to learn and grow. Or just solve problems at work. Sometimes we just need a little help understanding things.

    Many of us read a lot, but there is something special when we get together in groups at an event like a SQL Saturday or larger conference. There is energy and excitement, inspiration, and engagement that is hard to replicate online or in the written word. Especially during these times when the COVID-19 pandemic separated many of us from regular gatherings with others.

    We’ve had an amazing community, but lots of us are getting older. The people who taught me SQL Server, and many of whom have run user groups and organized SQL Saturdays will move on in their lives or retire. I’ve already seen plenty of people lose their energy or get busy with other parts of their lives during the pandemic.

    While we’ve had no shortage of speakers, I think we need to grow more for the future. I also want to get a more diverse group of speakers, not because we need more women or other minorities for some political purpose. I want more diversity of speakers because people with different experience and different frames of reference approach problems differently.

    I hope that many more of you consider giving a talk. I hope that some of those that do will love it and continue to do it more in the future. I’m also hoping we do see more SQL Saturday events come back in the future as these are a great way to encourage and support new speakers.

    Part of a Series of #NewStarNovember posts. If you want to help promote new speakers, consider writing a post as well. Some ideas at the New Stars of Data.

  • What’s the Edge Case?

    Quite a few of the bugs we see in production systems come from data that isn’t handled well. Perhaps the developer never considered this data, or another bug lets data into a system that should never be recorded. These are often NULL values, but they could be other data values that are far out of the ordinary.

    Where do we draw the line for edge cases? Is it anything that doesn’t fit 95% of the data range? I see this number used in many fields, often manufacturing and other “physical endeavors”. Is it the 80% rule, where we ensure 80% of data cases are covered, but 20% represent special handling?

    It’s an interesting thought because drawing this line helps us decide what level of data we need in our dev and test environments. We need enough data to represent what exists in production, but not much more. The less data we have, the faster everything moves, with much less friction in setting up, resetting, and moving these databases around.

    However, the more bugs that slip through, the more we might need to ensure that we add more data to our development environments to mimic what is in production. Often we have used copies of production data, but there are plenty of issues with this. First, we often have less security in non-production environments and no shortage of data breaches comes from these systems. Therefore we might need to apply masking/obfuscation/pseudomization to values. Second, production databases are growing larger, often over 1 TB. While storage and bandwidth are cheap, they aren’t free, and moving around 1 TB of data regularly, or even restoring it, can present resource challenges.

    My preference is a representative set of data from production, masked and without PII, along with some randomness that might catch edge cases before we deploy changes to production. With that in mind, what’s the edge case? I think I’d lean towards the 95% value, but ready to lower that if we discover many bugs.

    How many are many bugs? I might apply the same standard. If more than 5% of bugs filed are data issues, we need better dev/test data.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 14 Nov 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to get outside and observe the changes in nature around you .

    Nature is changing in Colorado as winter approaches. It’s been a dry year, and that means that plants have gotten crispy and dry with fire danger. The ground is also extra hard.

    I went outside recently to set up driveway markers for the winter. With 1/4 mile driveway, it’s easy to lose your way in the snow, even for us residents. Trying to put these markers in the ground was an exercise in frustration as I have very hard ground that is brittle. Even in places where I could get the pole in, the holding power of the soil was weak.

    It’s also very brown. Colorado isn’t a green state on much of the plains as it’s a high desert for much of the land, but it’s extra brown this year. The lawn is fading quickly, after a sprinklers ran until October.

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    While it lightly feels like fall, with cooler weather, the changes this year, with less rain and snow, mean it’s a different land than I normally see.

    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.