Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping–24 Mar 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s item from me is to write down ten things I’m grateful for and why.

    1. My wife –she’s the most important thing in my life and I’m lucky to be able to spend time with her each day and share my life.
    2. My oldest son – He’s a very different person from me in many ways, but I can also see my influence on him in his actions and behaviors. He forces me to think and view the world differently.
    3. My middle son – A much smarter person than I am, more focused and driven, which reminds me to stay humble as I am in awe of his talents.
    4. My daughter – She has a creativity I lack and an inner strength that I admire.
    5. My former business partner and friend – other than my wife, he has had the most influence on my across the last 15 years and we still talk weekly.
    6. Redgate – A company that’s the kind of company I’d want to build. I appreciate our values and am honored to work there.
    7. My boss – She helps keep me focused and grounded, and I look forward to our weekly chats.
    8. Our dogs – They enrich my life, in a way that is different from my kids and I miss them when I’m traveling
    9. The ranch – I live in an amazing place and I appreciate how lucky I am on a daily basis
    10. The SQL community – I’ve helped in a small way, but I’m amazed how close this community has grown over the years.

    I’m blessed and lucky in many ways. My life is as close to perfect as I’d imagine it could be. My problems are really minor annoyances and I strive to remember that every day.

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–A Neat Solution

    Travel is limited, or banned, in many cases these days. Events are cancelled or postponed, and there is a limit to how much contact we should have with each other. That’s hard in many ways, and it’s a challenge.

    I’ve been working at home for 17 years and it’s hard for me. This is a big change and there’s a need for adjustment for many of us, myself included. To give you a chance to step away from work, I’m taking a page from Mike Walsh and Straightpath Solutions. I’m going to set up a T-SQL Tuesday live meeting on Tuesday. I’m going to take an hour during the time I’d often eat lunch and run a virtual water cooler and run a virtual T-SQL Tuesday live meeting.

    I’ll use Zoom with this meeting URL: Removed (see the most recent post for the URL)

    The date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020

    • 13:00MDT
    • 15:00EDT
    • 19:00UTC.

    Rather than just a random get together, though we can talk about anything, I’m going to set a base topic and hope some of you come to participate with some thoughts.

    This week, Mar 24, I’m going to set the topic to be this:

    What’s a neat solution you found recently to a problem?

    This could be work related or not. Technical or non-technical. We’ll let the discussion go where it goes.

    If you’re looking for a little community contact, feel free to join me on Tuesdays. I’ll post a new topic each Monday that can think about.

  • Daily Coping–23 Mar 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today is the start of coping, and the newsletter has this in it:

    • Keep Calm
    • Stay Wise
    • Be Kind

    Interesting mantras, and they’re on the front page of the Action for Happiness site. Someone at Redgate pointed this out to me, and I needed it.

    It’s hard to keep calm. I’ve had people with direct contact to me or my family get sick. There are people my family knows firsthand that have gotten sick but can’t determine if they have COVID-19 or a bad flu. It’s a scary time, but I’m trying to remind myself that my family and I are healthy and doing well. This is a new reality to cope with and we need to support each other for now.

    I usually try to avoid news. The world has gotten very excitable, and there is a lot of sensationalism in the news. There’s a very disturbing partisanship online, and for the most part, I think people present themselves in a much poorer way than they do in person.

    However, I also think it’s important to understand what’s going on. I try hard not to get emotional, but just understand more about this pandemic and what makes sense. I try not to blindly accept things, but look for some confirmation that I am better off doing A than B. It’s hard, but I’m trying to get some limited information and make smart choices.

    I do think that this is the time to be more understanding and kind to others. That includes my family, as we’re self isolating for a few weeks. Close quarters bring conflicts, and so I am trying to remember to be kind when I can.

    I think this is especially important online, so if I’m less talkative, it might be that I need to take a few breaths and remember this.

    I’ll continue to talk about my coping mechanisms through this, and try to keep some daily things in the newsletter to think about.

  • What’s the Cost of an Hour?

    In 2017, we had a number of high profile downtime outages from companies. The British Airways fiasco, United airlines being grounded, Starbucks, Amazon, and more. There was a survey that noted 98% of respondents said an hour of downtime cost their organization over US$100,000. A third put that figure over $1mm.

    This week, I’m wondering if you have any idea what downtime costs your company. If you do, and can let us know, drop a figure in the comments. Maybe you can give us a range, or maybe you can say it’s a large amount. If you don’t know, maybe let us know if it’s not important to your business.

    I haven’t often calculated this, but when most companies look at lost revenue from customers, lost ability to conduct business, and potential losses from employees sitting around, it’s probably a large number. Then again, many companies might just force employees to work extra to make up the work, so perhaps some companies don’t care.

    This certainly isn’t a simple answer. Modern systems are often distributed, with many moving parts, and complex network connections. With modern software development using caching, micro-services, and feature flags, it’s entirely that an application is down for some clients and not for others. Or perhaps, a portion of the application is broken while other parts work.

    Downtime can be disruptive and expensive, and it is something most system administrators plan for and work to avoid. If you know what it cost for either the loss of a system or in your preparations, it would be interesting to know today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.