Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Christmas in July

    My son asked me to sign for a package on Friday. He was at work and had ordered himself some new joystick for a gaming thing. He told me this was his “Christmas to himself in July.”

    We’ve just past the halfway point of the year, and it’s been interesting. Both a semi-stressful moving on from the pandemic, and a fantastic opening up of life for me in many ways. I’ve had some great trips, experiences, and enjoyed time with people.

    This is a time when many will treat themselves to a Christmas in July, perhaps with a gift or a trip that let’s them enjoy life. I thought about that as I saw a few articles like this one on sales and deals. It’s Independence Day on Monday, a holiday in the US, and lots of retailers use this as an excuse for a sale. I won’t likely get anything techy, but I do need some new gloves since we are putting in 1000′ of new fence at the ranch.

    If you’ve had a good year, is there something you’d reward yourself with? A new mobile device? Maybe some tech-game thing? An upgrade to hardware? Maybe you’ll get a new car, like I did last year. Perhaps you’ll take a trip or partake in some event. I guess I fall into that category as my wife and I have tickets to the jazz festival in Winter Park in a few weeks. We’ll spend a weekend in the mountains as a reward for our hard work.

    If it’s been a tough year, maybe there’s something you treat yourself with to cope with this crazy world. Let us know what you will do, or maybe dream a bit and think about what you might wish you would do.

    Steve Jones

  • Goal Progress for June 2022

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2022.

    Ugh, June was no bueno for life goals.

    In May, I was away from home for 18 days. In June, I was home for 12 days.

    Most by choice, a mix of work and personal trips, but across 7 trips, it was a disruption to my schedule and I find it hard to cope and focus on anything extra during those times.

    I’m lowering the grade because most things haven’t changed. Essentially I read a little and got a few more SQL Saturdays scheduled.

    Grade: C

    Here are the goals:

    Work

    • DP-900 – Passed
    • DP-300
      – Stated studying, practice tests around 80% correct, need to schedule
    • Demo with SQL Server – 20% – dev db set up, started on pipeline
    • Demo with PostgreSQL – 20% – Dev db set up
    • Demo with MySQL – 0%
    • Feedback book – 100% – HIGHLY Recommended
    • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy – 48%

    Personal

    I made a slight alteration here. I didn’t try to hook up to Google Sheets, but instead pasted in some data and started to try and get this moving.

    • Link Google Sheets to Power BI – 0%
    • Create Report – 40%  – I have a report working for some of my metrics.
    • Create Dashboard – 20%  – A basic dashboard up, but need to decide on what to show here.
    • Get people using it – 0%

    Community

    • Support the Colorado groups by speaking twice and helping get one event set up
      – 40%
      • CO Springs event set up
      • Meeting with Denver SQL about an event
    • Speak at 3 other user groups outside of Colorado – 66%
      • Spoke at DBA Fundamentals group
      • Spoke at Toronto SSUG
    • Support SQL Saturdays – Help get 10 events run in 2022
      • I think we’re there. With the events coming online, there are 6 scheduled in H2, 3 that have run, and 3 more that are awaiting some detail to confirm. It looks like we’ll finish the year with 12, 10 of them in person.
    • Volunteer 4 days with Habitat – 0 days
      • Not happy about this. Now with a surgery, this will be delayed for a few months.

  • Daily Coping 1 Jul 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 be kind to you. Do something that brings you joy.

    Following on yesterday’s tip, I’m going to do something for me. In fact, I’m going to sit around on the porch (assuming it isn’t raining), have a drink, and strum my guitar in the evening. Just create some music and watch the world.

  • The Useful Cloud Tags

    One of the things I’ve seen in working with cloud based resources is that you get a lot of them in your account quickly. A database might end up with a server, an IP address, a network, security groups, and more. A few clicks of the mouse in the Azure Portal can create a new Resource Group that doesn’t just have the one thing you need, but 3, 4, or more other items.

    In addition to the quantity, there are also the problems of namespaces in cloud resources. Some of the items you provision are publicly named in a domain, such as database.windows.net. In these cases, the resources need to be unique among all cloud customers. Just like domain names, this means that you might have collisions with your favorite name. While I might like jones.com, there are a few other people that would likewise prefer this. The rest of us might have to choose jones2.com, stevejonesincolorado.com, or some other variation. In large organizations, you might end up with LA34532345454.database.windows.net for an Azure SQL Database.

    That means that the names of the systems don’t make sense to anyone, and many of the people that need to use or manage them will not even know which resource belongs to which system. This has been true for servers in many organizations for a long time, even with their own domains. Often there is some document, perhaps stored on the root of the machine or in an online share, that provides more information for people accessing the system.

    The cloud makes keeping track of systems harder, and there is a greater need to classify, categorize, and tag resources. Most of the cloud providers have built extensive tagging systems that help users add metadata to various resources and search/filter by these tags.

    Today I’m wondering which tags are useful in the cloud? How do you decide which tags, or type of tags, to apply? You might choose to apply an application name, a business department or owner, or some other type of information that helps you keep track of which resources are needed and how to deal with them. Is there some guideline on the type of key-value pairs you use for tags?

    I also would you want to easily have tags for on-premises SQL Server instances? We do have extended properties, but those are cumbersome. Would you want some sort of easy system query that retrieved all tags. Perhaps something like @@InstanceTags or @@DatabaseTags that retrieved all the data you’d stored in extended properties.

    We are only seeing more and more resources that need to be managed, patched, and deployed. Tagging is one of the ways that helps our organizations keep track of resources, especially if we provision them and we move on to our dream job somewhere else. Let me know how you handle things today.

    Steve Jones

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