Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 28 Apr 2021

    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 focus on a eating a “rainbow” of vegetables today.

    I like cooking. I find it relaxing, especially when I’m not rushed and can have a glass of wine while I work. Most days now it’s just my wife and I, and she is a good influence in trying to get me to cook a little healthier.

    Recently I found a recipe for Primavera Stuffed Chicken a few weeks ago and decided to try it. My oldest son was coming by for dinner, and I knew he’d enjoy it as well. I spiced it up by adding some yellow squash and asparagus as well, getting some more vegetables in there. With a salad that had some purple leaves and colored tomatoes, I think I got a nice rainbow.

  • A Cloud Database for Statistics

    Baseball is an interesting game from a data perspective, with lots of numbers being tracked, and lots being generated every year. I used to have a sample database for demos that I used, since it was fun to run various numerical queries on the data. I should set that back up.

    Recently I saw that an analysis site, FanGraphs, was adopting MariaBD, but in a cloud version of the database. They gather a lot of statistics, more than most places publish. Not only do they have the various aggregates from games, but they have tracking for things like the velocity of pitches thrown. Add that to odds, projections, and more, and this is a lot of data.

    For a fan, that’s a lot. For database people, maybe not so much. They are projecting a million records each season for pitches, which might be the largest data set. However, for a database, even with 100 years of baseball, 100mm rows isn’t that large. There can be, however, lots of queries on this data.

    The founder used to manage the database himself, and has been on MariaDB for a long time. He started on Windows, but has been looking to outsource some of the administration. They left dedicated servers to move to a vendor running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Now they are looking at data warehousing and other options to continue with deeper data analysis options.

    The move to the cloud, removing some of the headaches and hassles of managing servers is something many executives think about. Certainly it isn’t cheaper than buying your own machines, but with the cost of people, benefits, and the inflexibility of being limited by past decisions, I get why companies do this. Especially those that aren’t so focused on the technology, but are more interested in what technology can enable them to do.

    Many of us working might find opportunities to work with data at a company like this, without the need to actually manage the systems. I can imagine for a data analyst or developer that enjoys baseball, this might be a fun type of challenge. Learn to apply technology at a company that doesn’t really care about the software itself, but wants to use it to build something new and exciting for their customers.

    Steve Jones

  • Daily Coping 27 Apr 2021

    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 pick a new musical artist and listen to a few songs today.

    I love music, and a few of my coping tips have noted that. One thing I used to do when I traveled on planes by myself was download a few albums from one artist and listen on the plane. It might be someone I knew a few songs from, or someone recommended to me.

    For this tip, my wife turned me on to PJ Morton, who reminds me of Stevie Wonder. I downloaded a few albums of his the last time I flew in 2019.

    On Spotify, there’s a “Fans Also Like” section for artists, and I decided to try someone else that was on that page for PJ Morton. I found Jonathan Nelson and gave him a try. It’ s a little more gospel/spiritual than I like, but not bad.

    I also ran through an album from Ledisi, which is softer, quieter, and relaxing. I really enjoyed her.

  • Expanding Inclusion and Diversity – Better Linking

    I’m a native English writer/speaker. Some might debate how well I really know the language, but I am a native. I wasn’t a good student of languages. I struggled with Spanish I, took 4 years of Japanese in college, and wasn’t sure I really learned a lot.

    I tried to learn some Spanish when my wife hired someone who had that as a native language and struggled with English. I didn’t apply myself well and struggled. I also tried some Italian when my boss was learning, but again, continuity was an issue. However, the pandemic changed some of that, as I’ve been working on a streak with Duolingo, back in Japanese and practicing with my son, as well as doing French with my daughter. So far, I’m nearly at a year of some daily practice.

    What does this have to do with diversity and inclusion? It has a little to do with it, and a new habit I’m going to try and build.

    The other day I saw a tweet from @SQLChick: “I learned something cool! You know how Microsoft Docs are localized? We can tell because it’s in the URL. For me, that path includes “en-us/” and if I remove that, the Docs site adds it back when I visit the page. Removing it is better for link sharing with a global audience.”

    That’s a good idea. I’ve known this was the structure for MS Docs, but I hadn’t thought about it.

    I hadn’t thought about inclusion here.

    I often assume most developers know English, at least from the code standpoints. Most languages are implemented in English, and lots of software doesn’t get translated. However, that is changing, and I know companies are thinking about localizing things more and more.

    As they should.

    So, my challenge to myself, and you, is to grab links and make them local where possible. As an example, I was looking up this link the other day:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

    If I remove the “/en-us” part, I get this:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

    If I drop that in a new browser, it reverts to the English version, but if someone has their local system set for French, or Japanese, or Spanish, they get that version. The link works for them, rather then dropping into my language.

    It’s not necessary, but it’s polite. Something worth doing a bit more of all the time.