Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 31 Mar 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 appreciate your hands and all the things they enable you to do.

    My hands are critical. I learned to appreciate them quite a bit recently while trying to present at SQL Bits. I had injured my wrist and was wearing a brace to limit activity. When I went on stage and tried to use a mouse, I struggled because of the brace. I realized just how impactful an injury to my hands can be.

    I use my hands to type for work, play guitar, coach kids, cook, and more. When I’ve been injured, I find my life impacted substantially.

    I am grateful that my hands work well and have served me well across many years.

  • Passed a CosmosDB Exam

    I took the beta exam for Cosmos DB a few months back. I did this as part of the MVP program, as they were asking people to evaluate the exam and give feedback. I’ve lightly used Cosmos DB, but I also thought I might get some practice with the platform and taking an MS test, which I haven’t done in years.

    I passed!

    I got a note today that the results for DP-420 were in. This is the Designing and Implementing Cloud-Native Applications Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB exam, which is way out of my area.

    To be fair, I didn’t want to just take this blind, so I spent about a week and a half studying regularly each day, going through the learning path and understanding the different aspects of CosmosDB. It was interesting and confusing, but I acquired a decent understanding of what the platform is and can do.

    What I didn’t know were some specifics like how many RU/s might be available for a particularly sized contained. I did, however, learn about the different types of containers, accounts, hierarchies of things, etc.

    Feedback

    I like the beta exams because you get more than the 5 minutes or so to give feedback, and can do so for many questions. While I think the exams do test some knowledge in most cases, I also think that they can mislead people at times. I also think that some questions are really fact memorization.

    For example, if you asked me what is max size of a serverless container, that seems like a reasonable thing to know. If you’re planning an install, you should know that serverless limits things.

    However, this is a memorization fact. It’s a documentation thing you can look up in seconds, and by the way, you should. That number could change any day as Cosmos DB evolves.

    There were 2-3 questions like that on my exam and I gave that feedback. I don’t have a better question, but knowing that a container is 10GB or 50GB seems like a poor test of knowledge.

    There were a few issues I had with wording, but overall the questions weren’t bad, IMHO. They were hard. Unlike many of the other SQL exams, I found most of these to be hard and was unsure of if I really knew the answer.

  • My Favorite Data Platform Feature

    At SQL Bits a few weeks back there was a community keynote on Friday. Ben Weissman and Rob Sewell put this together as a fun way of involving others. They invited a number of people to each take 5 minutes and talk about their favorite part of the data platform, which encompasses a wide variety of technologies and products. There were a few people who chose Purview, Azure networking, and quite a few ways of using Power BI.

    Me? I choose the Create button in Azure. Really, Azure itself because of the amazing array of things that you can deploy in minutes. It’s stunning to me to think back to the mid-2000s, when I first saw the Azure platform at TechEd and a Microsoft employee demo’d a key-value table, literally a two-column table. They were trying to sell this as a great way to deploy lookup data to mobile sales applications at scale. I was less than impressed.

    This year I deployed a Synapse workspace in less than 10 minutes. Maybe less than 5. I know little about Synapse, and the idea of building a data warehouse and analytics platform, loading data, and running queries isn’t something I’d think I could do in 10 minutes, but I did it. I’ve found containers to be similarly useful in quickly getting something up and running, but even they require Docker or some other software installed and configured. In Azure, I can set things up in minutes.

    In the last year I’ve set up numerable resources, from databases to web apps to a Kubernetes install. All in minutes, which is quicker than I could do something on my local system except for creating databases. If I had prepped things or had more knowledge that might not be the case, but the lack of needing to prep or learn a lot to get something set up is amazing in and of itself. This is especially true when I want to experiment with a technology or a new solution. I can quickly build an array of systems with much less effort than on-premises.

    I don’t know how many of you use the cloud at work, but I find it amazing. It’s one part of the data platform from Microsoft that I really appreciate, especially as I’ve tried to work with MongoDB, Redis, and other technologies at home. The cloud makes things easier, even with databases.

    Today, I’m wondering what your favorite part of the data platform might be. Is it something in SQL Server? Maybe a related technology? Perhaps something else that helps you work with data these days. Let us know what data platform thing is exciting to your career.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 30 Mar 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 tune into your feelings without judging or trying to change them.

    This is an interesting idea. I saw this in an essay from David Perell, with the idea that we want to experience negative feelings (anger, sadness, grief), but let them wash over us and move on. I have been trying to do this.

    On the day I saw this tip, I was feeling upset, sad, angry, and more about some of the community issues I’ve seen recently. Some of these were from empathy for others, some were because I needed to deal with things.

    However, I also needed to both move forward with my day, and work on how to work with the issues. I’m torn how I feel about the issues, about people, and what I should do. All of those things are valid. I am not trying to change the feelings, but just deal with them.