Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Practice Until You Don’t Get It Wrong

    I wrote recently about a bad first day for an intern. He/she was fired, without cause in my opinion, when a production database was damaged while following a document for developer setup. The situation felt like a mistake, and one that wasn’t necessarily the fault of the individual. To me, this was extremely poor handling of the situation from a CTO.

    In the discussion for the piece, someone pointed out that it might not just be a new employee that makes a mistake that causes downtime. Certainly an unexperienced employee could have caused the issue, but I know there are people with lots of time in a position that make similar mistakes. It could be that someone that has been there a long time followed a poorly documented procedure, or applied the procedure to the wrong situation.

    In sports and the performance arts, I’ve heard a saying that says: amateurs practice until they get it right, but professionals practice until they don’t get it wrong. It’s the difference between just gaining a skill that you complete and continuing your learning to ensure that the execution of that skill is ingrained into your being. You internally build the muscle memory and skill to complete a task correctly over and over with practice.

    In the database world, this might be the difference between someone that has restored a database (the amateur) and someone that regularly practices restores of not only full database backups, but differentials and logs, tail log backups, filegroup restores, and more (the professional). The former has a skill, but the latter is confident and likely to complete the skill in a variety of situations without error.

    Practice won’t prevent mistakes, especially under pressure, but lots of practice does help us learn how to perform better. We learn what options are available, what issues might arise, and which choices we should be making. Just as professional athletes and musicians can make mistakes, we can as well. However, those mistakes should be rare. We should get most things right as the product of numerous hours of working deeply in, and understanding, our craft.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Hardware Wrestling

    A few weeks back I had some issues. They were related to this:

    Computer at ankle level

    My standing desk was down and as you can see, the power button for my machine is on the front, just above ankle level. In a few years of working, this hasn’t been an issue. However, my daughter has a puppy this year, and while she’s in school, the dog is home. Normally my wife is outside with the dog, but when bad weather strikes, they are inside.

    The dog can be a bit trying at times, and in this case, she comes to sit near my chair, looking for attention. When she did that last month, she leaned on the power button and shut Windows down. Not so bad, but the third time this happened, as I was prepping for a webinar 30 minutes ahead, I had a little panic.

    That incident let to me deciding I need a new case. I didn’t have a great way to move the case, so I got some advice and purchased a Fractal Design R5 case on a recommendation from Glenn Berry (b1 | b2 | t). Maybe overkill, but it’s a nice looking case, and the power button is on top Winking smile

    I got it home and promptly traveled for a few weeks. No real time to do much, but I did eventually get ready to move all the pieces and parts. I put the old and new cases on the table and started moving things. My middle son helped, and eventually we had the parts transferred.

    IMG_2995

    And nothing happened. No boot up, no fans, nothing. We looked and found quite a bit of thermal paste on the CPU, some of which leaked on the side. A good lesson for me, don’t use much paste. However, we we cleaned things, we ended up bending some CPU pins.

    No worries, annoying, but I could afford a new motherboard, so I grabbed one. And then went out of town again.

    When I got back, I replaced the motherboard, but no booting still. I even took a picture and tried to be sure the CPU slot was OK. I had to, since I couldn’t see the pins.

    IMG_3098

    I even got another CPU and tried that, but it didn’t boot. At this point, I dragged things over to Glenn (he’s close by) and we decided the motherboard must be bad. I returned the CPU and got another new motherboard, which I installed last weekend, and everything worked. From the go, things booted.

    I added a new SSD in the process, and somehow had to remap some drives to different letters to get my Windows install working. I have some other minor issues, VMs that thought they’d been moved, Windows Search service acting up, and general funkiness with new hardware, but it seems things have settled.

    I’m not a big hardware guy, but it was interesting to take apart and put together a computer. I rarely do that, and while it’s a touch exciting, it’s also a pain. I prefer my hardware to just work.

    The puppy is cute, and she’s fun, but demanding at times. Here’s my view of the TV, trying to finish up Stranger Things one night.

    IMG_3131

  • The Most Wanted Upgrade

    I replaced the case on my desktop recently, though not without a few struggles. A damaged motherboard in the move, and then a DOA replacement caused me a bit of a headache while troubleshooting. Fortunately, I was able to get a few minutes with Glenn Berry to find the issues. Things are back up and running now, which is good. I like my desktop and I’m more comfortable doing most of my work there.

    The process got me thinking about upgrades, especially when I got a look at Glenn’s newest machine. He hasn’t published details, but he did post a few results for his Intel Optane 900p PCIe cards. He also dropped a picture on Twitter of his Threadripper CPU. That’s quite a Task Manager display for a desktop workstation. I don’t know that I need that much power, but it’s still impressive and exciting. Seeing a recent picture of Andrew Kelly’s 38″ 4K monitor for his new workstation has me drooling a little, even though I don’t really need more hardware.

    It’s Black Friday, and while I doubt many of you are out shopping for yourselves, I do wonder if there are upgrades that you’d be excited to get. If someone were to gift you some computer hardware, what would you want? It could be hardware or software, desktop, mobile, whatever type of upgrade you’d want. Let me know today what you wish someone would give you for a present.

    I’m not an enthusiast. I think my son spent almost as much on his video card upgrade as I did for a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. However, I did get a little excited in looking at the various options in the Denver Microcenter store last week. From 3D printers to CPU water coolers to fancy video cards, I was tempted by no shortage of high end hardware. I don’t really need anything, and even passed on adding RAM to my desktop. 32GB works great for me, and while I might squeeze a touch more performance out of another 16 or 32, I don’t really need it.

    I am tempted by a set of larger, high resolution monitors. The idea of a couple of large, 38″ monitors that would spread work across my desk is tempting. Probably overkill and silly, but enticing. If I were to really dream about some upgrade, I’d like to get some faster internal 3D storage for my system. I hate waiting for programs to start, and getting some faster internal NVMe storage to replace a legacy 1TB HDD and get my system moving quicker.

    At heart, I’m a practical computer user, but I can appreciate the effort that some people put into build their systems. I’m just not sure that I’d want any of the fancy RGB lighting or as many cores in my video card as I have in my CPU. I’m also quite pleased with my mobile devices, so I don’t want an upgrade there, though I wish I could get a device with a different (bigger) battery.

    You might feel different and perhaps you can change my mind today. What cool upgrades would you make if cost were not an issue?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Thankful

    It’s been a long career for me. In fact, I’ve been a SQL Server data professional for 17 years, just over half my life and almost the entire lifetime of the product.

    In that time, I’ve worked for a number of companies in different positions. Some were good jobs, some were less good. Some lasted quite a awhile, some were short term engagements.

    No matter how the experience ended, I find myself thankful for each position that continued to move me forward in my career. Even the tough experiences were ones that taught me something that was valuable later on.

    I’m also very thankful that I had the support of my wife, both emotionally and with her own career. That gave me the freedom to try new positions and even start my own business. I’m thankful that I haven’t had any major health issues, nor has my family. That certainly made it easy to focus on my career.

    I’ve had a great life and tremendous opportunities. On this day of thanks, it’s worth reflecting a bit on what has gone your way in life. I do think about this often, but I certainly am happy to take a few minutes and note that there is an abundance of things for me to be thankful for on most days.