Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 5 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to choose to see your mistakes as steps to help you learn.

    I preach this with the kids I coach. Mistakes will happen, but let’s learn and grow from them and don’t dwell on them as failures.

    I make mistakes regularly. I typo things, I have mis-written something and needed to issue a correction to an article. I’ve published things that were plagiarized and sent apologies after pulling them.

    These things have taught me to slow down, double check my work, and accept responsibility. At work, I have learned that when working with sales, I need to be a little more cautious about how I present something. I’ve learned to be cognizant of different peoples’ roles and how changes affect them. Or even how proposals might affect their job.

    Each time I type something incorrect, or I offend/upset someone, or even when I might do something else wrong, I don’t get too upset, and I don’t say I’ll never do it again. Instead, I usually take a few minutes and try to think about how I might prevent this again in the future.

    It’s a good way to learn how to change habits and possibly prevent mistakes.

    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 4 Oct

    Today’s coping tip is to free up time by canceling any unnecessary plans.

    I. Suck. At. This.

    I don’t like to blow things off, and I do like to keep busy. I also don’t schedule a lot of things, and tend to just spur of the moment do things. I rarely make reservations or plans ahead of time.

    Recently, I had something cancel on me. I had planned to go watch some of the kids I coach play for their team. When the game got postponed, I didn’t look to see if there was another option and decided to relax at home.

    Overall, I am getting better about not making plans for vacations or trips and trying to enjoy some downtime. If an opportunity comes up to do something, I’ll decide if I want to participate, but I’ve learned not to feel pressure, or to engage in FOMO. I’m OK with missing things if I need downtime.

    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 Growth of IQP

    When Microsoft started to talk about Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) before SQL Server 2017, I wasn’t sure what to think. There was a diagram with 20 things on it, and only 5 were highlighted (you can see that in the article linked). That felt like something, but barely something. Over time, as we’ve gone through SQL Server 2019 and now 2022, the diagram now looks more filled in. In fact, now there are a lot of things filled in.

    When I think about new features of SQL Server, I don’t often spend a lot of time on the IQP stuff. First, I don’t have to live with people yelling at me every day about slow performance. If I did, I might be more anxious to test and evaluate the changes. Second, these are mostly just hidden things that come with the product and (fingers crossed) improve my workload.

    There’s an article on the 2022 changes, which improve upon some of the older IQP work as well as add some new items. It seems the feedback loops are getting better, though not perfect. I’m sure all the performance tuning experts will write posts about where these things fail, which is good. We want to know where we might have problems. Hopefully, we’ll also see lots of demo code that shows where these things work.

    One of the more interesting things is the Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization. This should help with parameter sniffing issues, though it will be interesting to see what percentage of a variable workload is improved by this. I also wonder if loaded systems that struggle here might have other plan issues. I already know some people have an overloaded plan cache now. If they could have even more plans for each type of query, there might be other issues to contend with.

    For the most part, SQL Server works well for a wide variety of situations. Many people seem to be quite pleased with how well it performs. I don’t know if that means customers look forward to upgrades or are happy where they are, but I am glad that the product doesn’t just add developer features or complex technology for administrators to learn. Getting investments in better query performance is important, especially as it can be hard to get developers to write better code on their own.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 3 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to write down three things you appreciate about yourself.

    I don’t mind self-evaluation, but I struggle a bit to publicly talk about things I do well. Still, it’s a bit of coping for me to become more comfortable. Here goes:

    • I work hard not to overcommit – I say no a lot which helps me to keep a lot of balance in my life.
    • I focus on my health regularly, not obsessively – After running every day for over 4 years, I’ve learned to continue to try to work out more days, but not get worried over missing some.
    • I can be extroverted – Not a lot, but I do well with audiences, presentations, talking in front of groups. It can wear me out and I need downtime, but I can do it. It’s made my life more interesting and fun.

    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.