Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 15 Oct 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to look out for positive news and reasons to be cheerful today.

    I actually tend to look for positive news in social media, but only in a couple places. The first is Instagram, where I post some pictures, primarily for my Mom and friends. I have a few accounts I follow, and I like to see what other people post, what captures their imagination, and often, what makes them smile.

    Often, that’s a lift for me because most people share the exciting and happy moments.

    The other place is LinkedIn, where I tend to see less complaining, but more people showcasing what they’ve done well in their careers. I can like, comment, and praise them for their efforts.

    There is good news elsewhere, but often buried in lots of no-good news.

  • Bean Counting to Burnout

    I was listening to a story about healthcare in the US recently. This was an interview with Vivian Lee, the author of The Long Fix, which proposes some ways to improve the system under which I live. I thought it was a good interview, and I am looking forward to reading the book.

    There was one stretch in the interview that caught my ear, and that was on the struggles of many modern doctors in the US to avoid burnout. A part of the reason for this is the amount of paperwork they must complete, which takes away from many of the reasons they got into practicing medicine.

    I know that many people in IT professions work long hours. We have lots of deadlines to meet, on call responsibilities, and the pressures to ensure that our systems work well for customers and clients. We don’t necessarily have the upside that doctors do, so working harder doesn’t necessarily lead to more compensation.

    On top of the work we do, there seem to be no shortage of meetings in many companies, though I don’t hear too many complaints about paperwork. However, with the move to more OpEx and cloud services, I wonder if we will have to deal with more paperwork in the future, more reporting, and more accountability for the financial side of our departments.

    I would like to think that we will continue to work with technology most of the time, and I hope that after this pandemic that most managers will cut down on meetings and start to trust more people to get work done without oversight. We certainly have enough of a risk of burnout without the added burden of unnecessary meetings and paperwork.

    Steve Jones

  • Writing Output from Powershell

    One of the things we often want to do when building a PoSh script is to get some output. I first learned about Write-Host, but I learned over time that this isn’t the best way to do this. Most of the early scripts I saw used this, so I was confused until I went through a few of this post: Write-Host Considered Harmful. This is from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PoSh.

    In the post, he notes that most of the time we don’t want to use Write-Host, because this means we can’t use the output of a command in the pipeline. For debugging you might think that this doesn’t matter, but Write-Debug is better.

    He recommend Write-Output, which is something I want to start to use. That, or Write-Verbose, so the user can get more or less output as needed.

    Hopefully this will help me to better write PoSh code that others can easily use.

  • Daily Coping 14 Oct 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to do something to overcome an obstacle you are facing.

    ob·sta·cle /ˈäbstək(ə)l/ – a thing that blocks one’s way or prevents or hinders progress.

    I’ve got speaking engagements coming up. Virtual ones, but still, I have to be ready. To be ready, I need to record the sessions. To record them, I need to practice and prep.

    I also lost time because I need to get these things done not by the event, but a couple weeks ahead of time. I also have a vacation scheduled.

    I took some time and closed down most things to focus on the main obstacle for moving forward: Powerpoint.

    The big issue is getting the outline into PPT with some slides and starting a flow. From there, as I practice, I’ll refine the talk and slides and get ready to record.