Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Daily Coping 4 Aug 2022

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

Today’s tip is to write down three things you are grateful for today.

I’m grateful for a lot of things, but the things that stand out today.

1. My kids are happy with us parents. They are all at home this summer, though the older two are living with us for the foreseeable future. We love that, and love having them around for dinner, movies, or just some conversation. They seem to enjoy being around us, which at 23 and 30 is not something I see often with others.

2. My health. I’ve had a couple minor things with health, but fairly minor. Those issues have prevented me from much gym/yoga/walking time for a couple months. I appreciate more and more my health and the things I can do (and I’m looking forward to).

3. The Tesla. I’m lucky that I can afford a car like this. Every time I drive it, it’s a fun experience. I can cruise easily, or I can make my stomach jump by pushing hard on the acceleration.

Lots more, but those are on the forefront of my mind today.

August 4, 2022
Solar Production After 5 Months in Power BI

I’ve been tracking my usage and comparing that with the estimates for my solar power system. I wrote about the database design and tracking the usage and some of the estimates.

In this post, I want to look at the reporting in Power BI. Here is my refreshed comparison report as of Jul 31.

I have 3 sections here. At the bottom right is a table with a range setting that shows raw data. I need to write about the import process for this data, but that’s for another day.

At the top, I have the running total of production (light blue) and estimated production (dark blue). The first month or so we were close to the estimate, but we started to outperform the estimate regularly, which is good news. The Tesla wasn’t in the model or estimate, and it uses some power, so it’s good the system is ahead.

The bottom left is the month by month comparison, which you can see is a fairly steady overproduction each month.

The configuration is fairly simple for this report. For the line chart, I’ve set the x-axis as the date. My Y-Axis has the sum of both of the raw production numbers. This gives me a running total across time.

The lower left month by month bar chart is similar, but I’ve added the month, which separate this into buckets. This lets me see if a particular month’s comparison is hidden in the line chart by the long term running total.

I can’t change much, but this does help me to look for anomalies and possible production issues. Perhaps a panel isn’t performing or there is another issue. By glancing at this every few days, I can decide if I need to look at more detail on the system.

Hopefully the company doing monitoring would detect issues, but this is a good double check for me and it also gives me long term data backup in case they have issues.

August 3, 2022
Digging into an AI Algorithm

One of the more successful uses of AI (artificial intelligence) has been in the medical field. It seems that there is a tremendous amount of data, high variability in some aspects of the target of the data (the patient), and a need to constantly review very tedious volumes of data. A place where AI might, and has, made a difference to help humans, not replace them.

There’s a neat article that dives into a bit of how a medical algorithm works for detecting sepsis. As you scroll, the article tries to explain in layman’s terms what the AI system(s) are doing. It goes through the necessity of regular data, which I think is a good design to push humans to gather data. It then talks about a variety of neural networks being used to analyze data, based on previous training from humans and past results.

It’s interesting to think of multiple nodes coming to their own conclusions are different times of the day and then later nodes looking at the results of previous nodes. That’s what a human would often do, looking back at recent history and giving that some weight. The system comes up with a number that a human can use to consider in their diagnosis.

It is interesting that the article talks about the need for humans to better communicate to use this system. I think that’s often a key with any computer assistance. The humans still need to use the computer as a tool and not as the final decision maker. However, at least in this instance, the tool seems to be helping reduce deaths in the hospital. I would hope that this is because the algorithm is detecting some patterns that are easy for a doctor to miss. It could be because the new system is focusing people’s attention better, and possibly this is a combination of both of these possibilities.

I do think that AI systems can be very helpful in assisting humans in many tasks, and medicine might be one of the places where AI will be most useful. The sheer volumes of data, the complexity of the cases, and the load placed on medical workers to monitor many people can overwhelm any one doctor or nurse. Having a system that might remind them of a small detail will hopefully save lives.

Steve Jones

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

August 3, 2022
Daily Coping 3 Aug 2022

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

Today’s tip is to choose to see something good about what has gone wrong.

Recently we had to replace our refrigerator. The old one, well, not really old. Four years old, but it died. The manufacturer couldn’t fix it, so they have us a settlement that we used to buy a new one.

However. It was a pain. We had to get a new one before we got money for the old one. We had to keep the old one around until we heard from the company, and we ended up throwing out some food.

There were some good things that came out of this:

We cleaned the fridge out and a number of things that were thrown away weren’t needed or haven’t been something we thought to replace.

This spurred me to spend time getting generator maintenance scheduled. Something didn’t work right at the end of the winter, and I’ve been wanting to get this going again.

This also helped me appreciate how lucky we are. We had an old fridge in the garage that we could use for some things. A pain to go outside and get things and take them back, but that’s a first world problem. I tried to remind the family of that.

August 3, 2022