Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Coding Tips

    I really like Visual Studio Code. The more I use it, the more I get comfortable in it, and the more I appreciate the design and flow of using the editor. I didn’t feel that way early on, preferring the comfort of Visual Studio, but now I most often use VS Code.

    The other day I saw an article from one of the PMs for the product, with a number of tips and tricks. I like some of these, and have already found a few to be handy in my work. I’ve even started to search out a few more of these, and found this repo with items in it.

    This reminds me of a few articles at SQLServerCentral on SSMS (tips, tricks). I’ve written a bit on Azure Data Studio and git, often to help cement some skills in my mind, as much as to help you learn more.

    I’m sure many of you have your own tips and tricks today, for both data platform tools and others, so I’m asking you to share a few in the comments. If you have a large collection of tips, on tools or just how to write code, write us an article. I’m sure others would love to know how to be more productive.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 19 Feb 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 stop and look at something in a new way today.

    The world is full of sameness these days. I feel like it’s March 312th, 2020 still in many ways. While I know it’s not, and I do get to do some things outside of my house, most of my world just repeats over and over.

    What can I see that’s new? The other day I was leaving to go to the store and I saw the Momma horse out by herself. Baby is getting confident and was walking around, but I stopped for a minute and watched Momma. And took a picture.

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    For most of the time she’s been here, about 7 months now, we’ve seen her as part of this foal process. However, she’s her own creature, and I stopped to look at her for a few minutes enjoying her life.

  • The Growth of Terabytes

    Years ago, fresh out of university, I joined the IEEE. As one of the benefits, I got their magazine, with various articles that might expand my knowledge. In one issue, I remember reading about the challenges of video on demand. At the time, calculating what it would take to store digital movies and broadcast them to each TV seemed like an impossible task. This was in the days if hardwired 10Mbps Ethernet and dial-up Internet.

    Not too long ago I had some Internet bandwidth issues, and got some stuttering during video meetings. I run Rainmeter as a skin on my PC, and once I got things working, I was curious what sort of bandwidth I was using. These days, if I’m not doing any streaming of audio/video, my PC seems to need about 1-3kbps to keep Tweetdeck, Outlook, Slack, etc. going. Youtube seems to get bursts to 1.5Mbps every few seconds, but plenty of low < 100kbps times in between. Netflix seems to be a steady 2Mbps to get video.

    All of that doesn’t seem to add up to much for my household. Even when 5 of us lived here, with lots of streaming from the kids, our symmetrical 15MBps connection worked fine. I don’t know what our total usage was for the month, but I doubt we used 1TB a month. Actually, if I calculate it out, full use of 15Mbps for a month is about 4TB, so maybe the kids got there?

    Apparently, more and more people are getting there. A report shows that 14% of some weighted set of subscribers use over 1TB a month. This is over their broadband connection, and likely leaves out mobile usage. While lots of this usage and bandwidth is transient data, like streaming movies, this also means that some data professionals, and network professionals, need to manage the data that flows.

    For many data professionals, this isn’t necessarily a problem, and in some sense, this is good for us. Heavy usage pushes the network staff to increase the speed and capacity of links. That means those of us transferring data (CSVs, backups, etc.), can get our jobs done faster.

    So watch more movies, stream more music, and root for the carriers to increase speeds and capacities.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 18 Feb 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 get moving. Do something physically active, ideally outdoors.

    My nephew came into town last night. He turned 18 recently, and he Dad and I got him a ski trip to Colorado. I donated our condo and I’m driving them up in a few hours. I can’t stay, but I do hope to get outside and spend a little time with them on the slopes, even for an hour.

    If not, I’m going to try and get back up there early Sunday morning and ski then. Enjoy the outdoors and get moving.