Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

More MVPs Than Awards

Every year, July 1 is the Microsoft MVP Renewal date and quite a few people received good news that day. I was one of those renewed for another year, and I am honored that Microsoft chose me again. I also congratulate all the others that received the award for the first time as well as those that were renewed.

Not everyone was renewed, and some very popular names were dropped from the list. I don’t mean to leave anyone out, but I did see a couple good friends were not renewed: Kevin Kline and Andy Kelly. Both are extremely talented SQL Server professionals and generous with their time and knowledge with the SQL community. They are truly MVPs to me, as they are to many others.

The MVP program is run by Microsoft, under their rules, and with their discretion about who is awarded and who isn’t. I don’t feel they did anything wrong here as I don’t know what criteria they use or what information they had access to. I also know they have a limited budget and have to make decisions about who to award each year.

The award is an indication that you are providing a lot of valuable contributions to the technical community about some Microsoft product. The amount that is a “lot” is some level decided by Microsoft. There are many people that provide very close to “a lot” of contributions to the community, but they don’t make the cut off. That’s just the way the program works.

Think of the 100m dash in the Olympics. Only three people get to stand on the podium after the final heat. They are the people awarded a medal. Don’t think for a minute that the other five in that heat aren’t fast. They are some of the fastest humans on the planet. They just didn’t make the cutoff for the medal. They are still Olympians and worthy of fans’ praise for their efforts.

The same thing goes for Kevin, Andy, and numerous others that didn’t get renewed. It also applies to even more numerous others that help me, you, and many people in their technical community every day.

There are more individuals out there that act like MVPs than Microsoft can award each year. Remember that fact the next time you read a response to a question you posted. Remember that when you attend the next SQL Saturday or other conference and listen to a speaker that is donating their time to teach you something. Remember that when you read an article by someone at SQLServerCentral or elsewhere. There are lots of MVPs for the data platform out there. Only a few of them get to use the designation from Microsoft, but all are worth thanking.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

July 29, 2019
The Data Request

Spotify implemented a way to get your data from your profile. This looks at the request and initial data download.

The Request

When you go there, you see a “Manage Your Data” section.

Below this is a “Download your data” section, with three steps. The first is a request to verify your identity. Clicking this will send an email to your registration email. I like the idea of verifying your identity somehow rather than just letting you get the data. Minor security hurdle, but still one.

After clicking on the email, step two lights up and shows you that it can take up to 30 days to get data. Similar to a GDPR request, I guess this sets some expectations if they get overloaded, but for now it’s annoying. We’ll see when the data comes.

Step 3 is the download link, that you can resend.

Overall, a good process to get what might be private data. It will be interesting to see what they keep on me and what songs and artists appear, both in popularity and unpopularity.

Getting the Link

About nine (9) days after sending my request, I woke up and found this in my email:

I clicked the link and went to the same manage data page shown in the first section, but before I could get the download, I saw this. Nice to see they are verifying access to get data.

When I verified my password, a file downloaded immediately. As expected, it’s zipped.

What’s in here? A number of JSON files, of various sizes. There are some items that are less interesting, like the plan and payments.

If I open the playlist.json file, I see this:

One cool thing here, is that this first playlist is one I created yesterday, the day before I received this link. Meaning, I think the notification was someone processing my request, not the time to get the data. The data was assembled with a process, that used data as of yesterday. I could be wrong, but I have a list of songs in a playlist.

Going on to StreamingHistory, which is where I thought I might see interesting data, I see this:

This looks like I only have a bit of history, not a lot. The first row is April 2019, the last row is July 2019, when I got the download. Disappointing, as I’d assume I’ll have a much different set of history this year than last year. I’ll have to load this into a database and try to decode it. That’s for another post.

It is nice to get some of this data, and I wonder what it looks like if I download it again in a week or two. Especially after another trip or two.

If I lose the data, I can go back and get the file again, at least for 30 days.

I’m glad that companies are starting to give us some data, at least for us data people. Certainly most people might just like a visualization of analysis of data, but allowing users to get their data means that *anyone*, or more *anyplace* can do this analysis for you. Opportunities that your data gatherer might not create.

If you use Spotify, I’d be curious what you think of your data. Feel free to write your post and leave me a comment on how you loaded and examined this data. I’ll do some follow-ups on this later.

July 26, 2019
Republish: A Clock With Benefits

A busy week in the office, so a rerun of A Clock With Benefits

July 25, 2019
Redis University

As if I don’t have enough to do, I started a data structures class at Redis University. Someone recommended this to me as another way a company has structured learning, so I decided to give it a try. There were some things they liked that we might use as Redgate University.

I decided to start with the 101 course, since I have a rough idea of what Redis is, but now how it works. The class has a number of videos, with transcripts alongside that teach various concepts. One thing I like is that if I get lost, I can glance at the transcript, click it, and the video jumps back to that point. That’s handy, as life sometimes distracts me.

The quizzes every video or two are nice, but I wish there was a bit more chance to practice things in the middle. I could certainly grab a Redis VM or container, but I have no real idea of how to access it, and I’d have another project. I would actually suggest some “launch lab” points after each set of videos with some practice tutorials or exercises.

The class has two weeks, with a few chapters, each of which is about 6-7 videos. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot in a week. If I could abandon some other things for an hour a night, maybe, but that can be tough to do consecutively. I’d really rather this was a 4 week class, with each of the items listed as a set of learning and practice for one week.

Overall I learned some interesting things about how Redis works. With the power and speed of this memory based key-value system, I can see why some of our customers are using it. If you are thinking about it, or your app uses it and you want to know more, maybe check out their university.

July 24, 2019