Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Follow Wheaton’s Law

    I’ve tried to live my life as someone that treats others well, respects them, and cheers for them to succeed. Even before I heard it, I think I was unconsciously following Wheaton’s Law (apologies for the slightly off color language).

    I think about this often in my life, as a minority in most places I go for work or in society. I’ve had a lot of success, I’m intelligent, am comfortable talking with people, and many things go my way. At the same time, I’m not any better than anyone else. I try to say hi to the facilities staff at Redgate in the same way I do with my fellow advocates. I may sit and chat with our cooks or cleaning staff just as I might take a moment to chat with a developer.

    With the dramatic changes brought about in our world by the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been thinking about the way that many people are interacting with those who work in much of the public world. Especially service workers, who these days may be deemed essential and are often the contact we have with lots of businesses, as cashiers, delivery people, and more.

    This article upset me. Many people that have the least power, the depend on their jobs the most, with few other options, are often treated poorly by the people they encounter. I’ve seen poor behavior in the past in many situations, but the current pandemic and the push back against wearing masks has made things worse.

    The entry level workers, those making low wages and doing many of the service jobs in our world, don’t deserve to be poorly treated because you don’t like the policy of some business. This certainly includes people doing manual work in our offices, acting as assistants, or some other non technical job. Treat other people well, as you’d want to be treated if someone didn’t like the way you were instructed to do your job.

    Steve Jones
    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Building an Azure Architecture Diagram

    One of the challenges I have at times is illustrating how I’d set up a particular system. Not the technical details, the visual ones. I can use boxes and simple shapes in PowerPoint, and include some logos, but this always feels fairly unprofessional.

    Fortunately Redgate has some icons and images I can use to illustrate how things work. I saw recently that Microsoft makes these available as well. There is an Azure Architecture Icons page.

    The icons are svg, so while they work in PowerPoint, adding them to something like this post in OpenLiveWriter doesn’t work. However, I could make a quick diagram and capture an image of it.

    2020-07-21 12_57_56-Presentation1 - PowerPoint

    Not great, but it shows I can put icons on a page with arrows.

    I would hope they’d make similar icons available for products and perhaps other features, like Azure Boards, Pipelines, and more. I haven’t seen official ones like this, but I hope I do.

  • The Computing Revolution

    One of the keynotes at this year’s Build conference was on the Future of Tech. This was a mix of live talk and recorded pieces from Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft. This talk looks at the innovation of tech, with lots of AI/ML, but also with the idea that data is fundamental to the future. While he notes that there are different eras in computing as we have breakthroughs, one of the fundamental things that will change the world is the data explosion.

    We constantly push through boundaries and past constraints that limited us just a few years ago. I can still remember a professor in college bragging about the 32MB of RAM in his Solaris workstation, at a time when many of us had 1,2, or maybe 4MB. I think about that each time I get a new device. In a generation of my life, we’ve grown an order of magnitude, and pushed into a new world where I don’t have an exponential level of computing on my desk, but in my pocket.

    We might appreciate or worry about the growth of data, and it’s implications, or we may get excited and embrace it. Either way, big data is coming, and it continues to come to many organizations. While most of us aren’t pushing 10TB+ databases, some of us are, and few of us think in MB anymore. Makes you think that perhaps the default settings in SQL Server for MB in some cases are silly. Surely a MB is a like a penny (or pence in the UK), take one, leave one, but they don’t really count. Not until there are hundreds of them, and even then, maybe only a thousand is worth much mental effort.

    I do agree that the big win with the Internet, and with many pieces of software, isn’t the platform, but the ways in which people take advantage of the platform. I think that the creativity of developers, taking advantage of incredible computing on mobile, is what has created an amazing revolution. However, it’s not really just the creative software, but the understanding and use of data at scale that has really enabled software to change the world. Access to lots of data, whether this is people wanting car rides, sharing their thoughts and images, or just the bits that make up the music of the world are the ways in which software can become incredibly popular. Also, this is how things might get incredibly dangerous.

    I do think that AI has the chance to become an inflection point in computing, helping to create more applications that will work with humans in new ways that harness our knowledge, ethics, and vision with the computing power that continues to grow in incredible ways.

    The keynote is an interesting watch. It’s about 45 minutes, but if you want to dream a bit, it’s worth your time.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 27 Jul 2020

    I’ve 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 make a list of three things that you can feel hopeful about.

    1. Success against COVID

    There are a number of drug trials showing some early success, but more importantly, there are a number of trials. We, as a world species, are trying lots of things. Hopefully something works and we share.

    2. We can exercise with masks

    Colorado implemented a mask order just after a volleyball practice a couple weeks ago. My gym for working out, and the one for coaching, both adhered to this. I held a practice after this, and the sixteen 13/14 year old girls wore their masks without complaint. They got pulled down once in awhile, but for the most part they wore them.

    At the same time, I see lots, most people, in my workout gym wearing masks while working out. I tried it while lifting, and while not something I like, it’s not that bad.

    3. My daughter will hang out longer

    My daughter is a starting volleyball player in college. Last year, other than a couple matches missed for injury, she played every point as a freshman. It was quite exciting, traveling to watch her play live in New York, as well as streaming games from London, Sydney, and around the US. I was really looking forward to that again.

    However, her conference suspended fall sports. They might move to spring, but for now, no sports. As a result, she is thinking that she doesn’t want to go back for the fall. It’s a lot of money, and if she can’t hang out with friends and is watching a screen, she would rather stay here, save some money, which might get her another season of play, and work for my wife.

    I like having her around.