Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 25 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to share a helpful quote, picture, or video with a friend.

    I usually enjoy sharing quotes with friends on their birthdays. Those of you who know me on Facebook usually get one.

    However, I’m sharing one today that I think is helpful to me, both in my career in technology, in coaching, and in my endeavors:

    “What do you do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” – Dean Smith

    It’s a very DevOps way to view the world, and I like this one.

    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.

  • Good Enough

    I find that many of us that work in technology want a solution to be great. Often perfect. Computers are so good at following instructions that we expect them to work as we intend all the time. We aim for being perfect in our code and we find “good enough” to be a low bar.

    I think this is because many times we deal with code that barely works and gets deployed because it’s good enough. Maybe the code can’t handle a load or corner cases and that’s caused us some sort of stress or pain. So we don’t want “good enough”. because we’ve been burned in the past, either by our code or someone else’s.

    However, good enough means to me that it is good enough for most situations. It’s not leaving something unfinished or undone, but finishing something that works well. I often tackle small projects or minor tasks in this manner, usually because of time crunches. I consider the performance impacts, but in a realistic sense. Not all of my code will be accessed by thousands of users trying to process millions of rows. There are plenty of systems where we know the code will be thousands of rows and dozens of users. We should write the best code we can, and spend time improving our coding skills over time, but we don’t need to over-engineer code too early.

    At the same time, we should not be satisfied with code that we think will not meet the needs of our customers. Whether in function or performance. Sometimes we make quick decisions, knowing we will need to rework the code. In that case, we need to allocate time, file a bug ourselves, or do something else to ensure we revisit this code. That has been the case often with administrative code that I need to run today, but I know this will need to be run regularly over time. I might shortcut code with a cursor or loop, but plan on finding a better solution that performs better and is more robust. If the task can be automated, this means I need to include error handling, logging, and more.

    Life is a series of trade-offs. I rarely get something done as perfectly as I’d like, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to be better over time. I can chase perfection, especially in code. If I regularly learn and change how I code, I find that my “good enough” becomes better and better every month.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 24 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to find joy in tackling something that you have put off.

    I on not a bad procrastinator, but I do put plenty of things off. Usually this is because I try to always have work done for the next week, which means I am looking forward two or three weeks all the time.

    That usually gives me a bit of time to procrastinate if I don’t feel like working on a task.

    This is often the way I tackle ranch tasks, as we often can look forward and plan out fixing or improving something. Recently, I took time to handle a few things that I’ve been delaying.

    First, I changed oil in the UTVs on the ranch. We use these things regularly, and I tend to handle the maintenance. However, I don’t love changing oil. It’s easy and not that time consuming, but it’s dirty and annoying, and I avoid it. I took time to just deal with a couple vehicles this past weekend.

    The second thing is that I put an electric winch on a door during the pandemic. It’s worked OK, but it hasn’t been completely stable. It twists a little under high wind loads, and I end up going out to tight and re-align it at times. I had purchased a couple brackets, but needed a few new bolts and then time to mount those under the winch. I took time to just knock this out as well.

    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.

  • From Manual to DevOps at the Data Community Summit

    This year the annual PASS Data Community Summit is hybrid, both in-person and virtual. It’s exciting to have this coming back and I look forward to seeing people in Seattle if you can come.

    You can register today and save with these codes:

    • $200 off the in-person, 3 day conference in Seattle: SJSUMMIT93

    I’m doing a precon on the journey from a manual process to an automated DevOps one. So many customers I work with are dealing with these issues, trying to decide how to move from their existing process, whatever it is, to a more reliable, repeatable, automated one. With Grant and a few fellow Redgaters, we’ll be starting from nothing, as many of us do. Then every 30-ish minutes we’ll be deploying our code in whatever process we’ve built to that point.

    Hopefully, this will be fully automated with a DevOps style flow by the end of the day (fingers crossed).

    We’ll be using the Redgate Flyway Enterprise suite of products, talking about the concepts that are useful to help you build and deploy database code in a team.

    Join us, or one of the other great pre-cons and I’ll see you in Seattle.