Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Make the most of your PASS Summit Evenings

    At this year’s PASS Summit, I’ll only be around for a short time, and really only Monday night. I have two pre-cons to do and then need to get home for some personal commitments. I am hoping to make the first of these events, but if you’re there all week, I’ve got two things for you to attend.

    Monday Night Networking

    Years ago Andy Warren and I (mostly him) set up a networking dinner on Monday night. The idea was to get people together that were there early and have them socialize and meet fellow professionals. We ran it for a number of years before handing it off to Lisa Griffin Bohm, who continues to run it now.

    This is listed as one of the community events, and it’s on Monday, Nov 4, at the Tap House on 6th. It’s from 5:30-8:30 and I’m going to drop by and say hi.

    You can sign up here, and I highly recommend this if you don’t have plans. There are free tickets, but this is mostly to manage the flow of people. This is buy your own, but it’s a fun time for everyone.

    Come meet some people and share a drink or dinner.

    Game Night

    Another idea from Andy and I (again, mostly him), but this one was fun. We decided that we didn’t want a loud night in a bar that some vendor hosted. We knew lots of fellow attendees felt the same way, so we hosted a game night in a room at the Convention Center. Quiet, bring your own games or join in with others. There are lots of gamers out there and some really fascinating games.

    To ensure we can cover a bartender with both non-alcoholic and alcoholic drinks, tickets cost something here, but the tickets can be exchanged for a drink.

    Kevin Hill hosts this now and there are two nights. Sign up for Wednesday with Kevin or Thursday with Matt Cushing (or both nights).

    Community and Vendor Events

    PASS doesn’t run a party anymore, but there are lots of things happening all throughout the week. There are a number of events (including those above) listed on the PASS Community Hosted Events page. Click the various boxes at the top to see different events that are happening.

    I urge you to engage in some social event. Something quiet, something fun, it doesn’t matter. Just meet and network with others. If nothing else, sit with someone at lunch and then ask if they want to get a quiet (or not so quiet) dinner later.

    Or set up your own event. A number of these events are started by someone in the community, and the next fun thing could be yours.

    One hint: if you want to attend a vendor party where things are paid for, go have an honest conversation or two with a vendor in the expo. Ask them questions, learn what their products do, and see if something might help you at work. Regardless of budget, educate yourself and maybe you’ll get a ticket to one of their evening parties.

  • Republish: Have a Think

    Traveling to London today for the SQL in the City Summit, so you get to Have a Think

  • Arrays in PowerShell–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    This isn’t necessarily an expert post, but more a recognition that I learned something. I knew about objects in PowerShell, but I’d never actually used an array. Never had a need.

    However, while writing my article about striped backups, I ended up using arrays. This was mainly from the example shown by Anthony Notencino in his Restoring Backups from Azure Blob with dbatools.

    Here’s a way to initialize an array:

    $a = @()

    If I look at this, I get nothing back, which makes sense. There’s nothing in there.

    2019-10-10 14_41_05-cmd - powershell

    I can “add” values to this array with +, as in:

    $a += 1
    $a += 2

    If I now look at the variable, I see this:

    2019-10-10 14_44_41-cmd - powershell

    One interesting thing here is that += is different than Add(). Look at this:

    2019-10-10 14_52_15-cmd - powershell

    So why does += work? In the array doc, there’s this quote:

    When you use the += operator, PowerShell actually creates a new array with the values of the original array and the added value. This might cause performance issues if the operation is repeated several times or the size of the array is too big.

    Worth knowing this. I think for most scripts this isn’t a big issue, but be aware that you are allocating a new array.

    Working with arrays is a topic for another day, but this is a short look at how you might store something like a list of files in a single place.

    SQLNewBlogger

    While working on solving the problem for a customer, I realized this was a little thing I learned. A quick post to show that here, just about 10 minutes or writing and structuring code.

    A good chance to give an interviewer something to ask you. Write your own post on arrays.

  • The K8s Overview

    I’ve written some posts on Kubernetes (K8s) as I think this will be an important technology in the next decade for database systems. Actually, it’s not that I think Kubernetes is that important, but rather that the orchestration of containers that run database systems, along with the storage and networking, will be necessary. Kubernetes appears to be the most common and popular orchestrator, but that could change. There are other orchestrators out there.

    Part of the reason that some technology gets adopted is that managers read about it and push it. Certainly technical staff have input, but managers have influence, and ultimately spend money on projects. While every manager wants to succeed and make their mark, no one wants to be left behind and have made a poor technology choice. As popular as containers and Kubernetes are, a little advocacy from management might get you moving in that direction. That’s if you want to implement containers.

    If your manager knows nothing about Kubernetes, can they still recommend the platform? Sure, but you can also help them to understand how it works and what the impact of this choice might be. I ran across A Manager’s Guide to Kubernetes Adoption, which is a good read for a manager, perhaps tempering some of their enthusiasm to just install Kubernetes now. In fact, if you know nothing about containers and Kubernetes, you might give it a read as well.

    I’ve changed my mind on database containers, and I do think Kubernetes has a future in the life of the data platform pro. It’s not simple, and may not be easy to run for some time, but I think that will change. I do think we’ll eventually just get a K8s service, or simple install, or use it in the cloud. I also think we may not need a lot more Kubernetes knowledge than is in the post, but we certainly will want to know what configuration items might affect our workloads, and certainly we’ll still need to think about, and set limits (high and low) for our database systems.

    I don’t think that our world will change quickly, and certainly the more legacy applications you run, the longer your transition will be, but I do like the concept of Kubernetes as a platform where I deploy applications and services. I haven’t quite felt that way about AzureStack to date, nor OpenStack and other variants, but Kubernetes seems to be a better idea for what I’d want. It will take time to get there, and it’s not trivial effort to move to it, but once there, you should have reduced some of your infrastructure headaches.

    As to whether your application will run better, look to your developers. All the hardware and well built platforms in the world won’t work well if you don’t write good code. Spend some effort there, and then think about moving to containers and orchestrators.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.