Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Happy New Year 2018

    It’s the start of a brand new year, and hopefully many of you are not anywhere near your work today. I hope to be running a 5k this morning, so I’m up early, at my usual time for work, getting ready with a jolt of coffee before a nice jog. I haven’t run a lot the last few months, so I’m just going for fun. I’m writing this early, so if the weather is bad, I’ll likely go to yoga instead.

    In any case, this is usually a day off for most people working with data, so I hope you enjoy yourself with a quiet day before we begin the new work year tomorrow. I’m excited, with less travel, to tackle some projects around SSC. We are looking to upgrade hardware and software, moving into the new era of SQL Server, maybe even with graph tables! If there’s something you’d like to see, apart from bug fixes, let us know. I’ll be meeting in the next few weeks to lay out a direction and try to get moving forward.

    Happy New Year!

  • Sizing New Servers

    I ran across a post this week from Joe Chang on server sizing. It’s short and talks about some of the issues that you might consider when looking at a single socket v multi-socket systems. What first caught my eye, however, was the opening sentence: “Standardizing on 2 and 4 sockets systems for servers has been an established practice going back to 1996”.

    I think that’s been my experience overall. For most of my early career, we often did purchase 2 or 4 socket systems. A few times I had 8 sockets, but hardware costs and licensing were high. When VMs became the preferred method of building servers, we tended to just ask for 2 or 4 vCPUs. If the system ran slow, we just doubled the vCPUs.

    Time has moved one and hardware has advanced at incredible rates. These days licensing by core has really changed the way that I look at hardware. I couldn’t tell you how many sockets servers have, as I’d likely just ask for a VM with x CPUs (and lots of RAM) allocated. Whether the system was 1, 2, 4, 8, or more sockets wouldn’t be a consideration. In fact, I’ve somewhat given up on trying to track which CPUs have what cores and what the best choice is. I take the simplistic view of a core is a core and the hardware geeks will figure out how to get those into my VM.

    I wonder how many of you actually worry about the hardware in your system beyond gross layout? Do you dig into tracking which CPUs need to be inside a physical box, the type of RAM layout, the drives (beyond size and count)? Or are you like me. Your system is JBOC (just a bunch of cores), JBOR (just a bunch of RAM), and JBOD. If things run slow, after fixing code, I usually JWM (just want more of something).

    Certainly there is a need for someone to pay attention to hardware details, perhaps if for no other reason than to ensure that price/performance is being considered and there are spare parts available. For me, as a data professional, I’ve tended to just look at the performance needed from a system and ask for that. Even in my last position as a DBA, my concern was the SQL Server process and how it worked, limiting my hardware concerns to knowing the CPU count, RAM size, and number of disks. I’ve abstracted away hardware for the most part, focusing on a higher level of the system.

    For those times when I do care about hardware, such as when laptop shopping, a simple query of a few colleagues or a tweet nets me enough information to make a choice. After all, that’s what friends are for.

    Steve Jones

     

  • The End of 2017

    This is it. Today ends 2017 for most of us at work and when we come back on Tuesday, it will be a new year. It’s kind of amazing to think another year has gone by, though it’s been a long year for me. I can barely remember last New Years, though I know I was skiing this time last year with my daughter. Maybe I’ll get the chance to do that again this weekend.

    This has been a busy year, full of SQL Server and database changes. We got a new version of SQL Server, and a new platform with the release of SQL Server on Linux. This has been in the works for quite some time, and I’m glad it’s come out. I keep seeing more people interested in working on the Linux platform, so I expect this will be more popular than I might have guessed. We also got the addition of Python as a languge inside SQL Server, which is cool. I like it better than R, and I expect we’ll see more and more Python code inside the platform over time. Add to that the addition of graph capabilities, and SQL Server is becoming a more well rounded platform.

    As is the case most years, security issues continue to haunt us. More data breaches, including a wide reaching set of lost data with the Equifax issues. I had hoped this would stir the US to move towards something like GDPR, but so far nothing has been done. We’ll see how GDPR affects things, though I see plenty of Redgate customers asking for features and support that will ensure they are compliant. We’re hard at work, as are many other vendors. I hope you are as well. This reminds me of the year 2000 efforts, though at a smaller scale. Now we don’t have an unknown issue as far as technology goes, but we might still have business problems if our organizations violate GDPR. I expect late 2018 and 2019 to be boom years for European solicitors.

    What seemed like a set of niche technologies, AI, ML, and bots, seem to be growing more and more important all the time. I’m somewhat amazed at how often I see talks on these topics, from both consultants and vendors, who are building systems. As I’ve looked into these areas, I’m surprised at how widespread the use of machines is already, doing work that I thought humans were doing. What’s more, the demand for data has grown tremendously in order to feed and train the systems that people are building. FWIW, supplying training data has become a big business, and I’m sure we’ll start to see yet more data about us being sold and compromised as companies seek to build more helpful systems. Helpful to their business, perhaps not to us as individuals.

    In any case, I see more and more posts and experimentation from data professionals that are using the R language, Power BI, and other tools to better analyze data. While writing reports and creating queries has been something many of us do, I think some of our colleagues have found that producing more complex data visualizations is a way of adding more value to the skills they bring to an employer. With lots of deeper analysis in the news, I think that the management in many companies appreciates this and may expect it from future employees. Something to keep in mind.

    There has been plenty of technological change, but overall the year seems to have focused on many soft skill matters. With the awareness and outrage over various behaviors by those in power, I wonder if we will start to see changes in our industry. I’ve been proud of the Women in Technology efforts from PASS and others across the last few years, and I hope we continue to grow and evolve to treat each other as the capable professionals we are. I also am glad to see more and more tech companies and events embracing a more professional, less bro-grammar culture.

    It’s been a long year, and an interesting one as DevOps continues to dominate the world of software development. I hope to see that continue, especially as my employer has devoted a lot of work to help include databases any DevOps culture. However, as I heard recently at SQL in the City, DevOps isn’t an excuse to ship more crappy software to customers. That include databases, so as you move forward, perhaps at a quick pace, don’t forget to evolve your database in line with well known and well documented database design principles.

    2017 has been a good year, and I look forward to 2018. Happy New Year, have a safe holiday, and I’ll see you in 2018.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Speaking in 2017

    I’m done. No more trips (and no more time) to hit any events this year. As I wrote recently, I’m doing less in 2018, so this review might be quite short next year.

    In any case, I thought I’d look back at how speaking went in 2017. I have a speaking CV where I track all my events, so I can get the numbers easily from there. By the numbers, 2017 was:

    • 18 total events
    • 34 total talks
    • 15 unique talks
    • 5 SQL Saturdays (not a lot)
    • 5 virtual events (3 from Redgate)
    • 4 new events for me
    • 4 countries in which I delivered talks (1 new)

    Overall a long year for me. Those 18 events resulted in a lot of trips and about 80 nights in hotels. I had some work engagements as well, but most trips involved speaking somewhere.

    I am saddened that I didn’t present at any user groups this year, which is something that hasn’t happened in awhile. Hopefully I’ll do better next year at getting to a few user groups.

    One thing here is that I discounted some of the Redgate DevOps webinars that we do monthly. I probably did 5 or 6 of those, but I’m not really presenting in most of these, mostly hosting, so I left those out.

    Oh, and 1 Habitat for Humanity talk to add to this list Winking smile