Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Goal Progress Report–Aug 2020

    This is my every other month report, which has worked out better than every month. Last year I tried every month and when I didn’t make progress, I started ignoring reminders. For me, the too often a reminder was demotivating. It might be a better check for others, but not for me.

    I do have a weekly reminder to spend some time, which sometimes works, but not enough. I likely need to move this to a different day/time.

    This is an update on where I am.

    Reading Goals

    Here were my goals for the year.

    • 3 technical books
    • 2 non-technical books

    Books I’ve tackled:

    I made an effort during some lunches and breaks to work on Making Work Visible and finished it. The middle of the book was hard, but the end got me thinking again. I’ll write a review soon.

    No Power BI or White Fragility. I’ve been a little unfocused and struggling to cope for a couple months and trying to let my brain relax when I can.

    I added the last book after hearing the author talk about poker and how it relates to life and decision making. So far, it’s a mix of poker, fear, and the challenges of imperfect information.

    Project Goals

    Here were my project goals, working with software

    • A Power BI report that updates from a database
    • A mobile app reading data from somewhere
    • A website that showcases changes and data from a database.

    I started compiling some data, grabbing some stats from my life. I’m loading that into a db , as a part of life and some content work, so I’ll write about that. Once I get that loaded, I’m thinking to use that db as a way to kick start some of these items. Work is slowing slightly in Sept, so I think I’ll fold some of this into my focus at work. Maybe this will be a way for me to make more progress.

  • The Evolution of Windows

    I like Windows 10. I’ve used every Windows version since 3.1, abandoning Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 8. That last versions I used very briefly, didn’t like it, and quickly returned to the previous version. I thought Windows 7 was amazing, using less hardware resources for the first time ever, and I’ve enjoyed Windows 10 since I upgraded. In fact, I think at this point I’ve built 4 or 5 different Windows 10 machines from scratch.

    I don’t change hardware, but Windows 10 has evolved, essentially growing without changing versions. It had its 5th anniversary recently, and I was surprised to see a few articles like this one, that all talked about Windows 10 not being a success. News to me, since I’ve been happy with it.

    It’s interesting that the article talked about some of the promises of Windows 10 not being fulfilled. I don’t know about the “free” aspect of it, though I do think Cortana was a bit of a failure. I didn’t use it much, but I think the always listening and the issues with Siri/Alexa/etc. for speech platforms is an issue. I don’t know many people that aren’t geeks using Cortana, but perhaps this just isn’t a useful thing in a non-phone OS? There are a few other things, but you’ll need to read the article for yourself.

    What I’ve noticed is that the evolution of the OS has faded a bit into the background. I do worry about updates, but I worry about lots of software updates. While quality has improved, the chance of being down is always disconcerting. While I haven’t had any Windows 10 update issues across my 3 machines, or even any Android updates across the last 3 phones in 4-5 years, I still worry.

    I also think the evolution of adding the Windows Subsystem for Linux is cool. I don’t run a lot of native Linux stuff, but I do run Linux containers for SQL Server and I SSH into systems once in awhile, so I appreciate the native tools rather than some Windows port.

    I do think we may get to the point where SQL Server versions fade a bit, with patches adding features, but I don’t know we completely get away from versions. I think there’s too much revenue from major upgrades, and since customers rarely want to make that investment, both for financial and time resources, means that I think we’ll continue to get new major versions of SQL Server periodically, unlike Windows.

    The one thing I’d like to see if SQL Server stop evolving the database structure, and allowing the restore of a SQL Server 2021 database on a SQL Server 2019 instance, assuming no new keywords are used. I don’t know if we’ll see that, but I know many people would like that.

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 1 Sep 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 plan a future project or gathering in your local community.

    I tend to go small, so I decided to tackle this in my own way. I have enjoyed volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. They have started taking volunteers to help build again and I scheduled a day to help with their current project.

    They always need help, so if you’re interested, volunteer.

  • The Challenges of Resetting Databases

    I was working on a demo recently where we had a database in version control and a development database. This was a team environment, with a few of us making changes and syncing them across our dev systems using git. We had some advanced technology with our dev environments in containers, Flywaydb, and GitHub. Once we had our scenarios working, someone wanted to reset our git repo and capture a new database image.

    However, when we reset the repo back, we had some issues with the database. In this case, there were changes in the database that didn’t exist in the repo, giving us a mismatch. Not a big problem, but cleaning things out to get the db to match the repo, without putting those changes into the repo, was a challenge.

    A developer I was working with got a little frustrated, because when working in C#, there is no state. If we reset the repo and sync our local copy, we have everything ready to go. However, a database repo isn’t the same because there is often a database that exists separately.

    This is the main challenge when working with databases, relational or otherwise, in a development environment. Experiments, bug fixes, even testing data changes persist over time. Resetting data to repeat tests, or even automating tests, can be hard.

    This is one reason I think containerization and subsetting of production datasets will become very important over time as we try to ensure we can react to business requirements and keep our teams coordinated. These technologies ensure we always have a known starting point for our databases. At least at any particular moment. We certainly need to update this foundation as we deploy changes to databases.

    Hopefully Microsoft, more vendors, and us as developers help advance these technologies, as well as help all developers build more skills. I’m grateful to Andrew Pruski, Anthony Nocentino, and others for the information they share about containers and databases. Hopefully we see more people engaging in these areas over time.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.