Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • The 2024 DevOps Airways Tour is On

    AMER Roadshow 2024 - 300x250 Generic - 1

    The Tour kicked off last month in San Jose, where I presented all day with Andrew Pierce, one of our solutions engineer. It was a good day, and the tour continued in Charlotte, NC, where Grant presented at that one with one of our talented sales engineers.

    To get you a little excited, we also have a promo video:

    We’ve got other dates as well, so let your team know, your friends know, and join us on DevOps Airways tour. If you want a concentrated day of learning, pick one of the workshops. If you want a larger event, come to London, Chicago, or New York and attend a Redgate Summit.

  • A New Word: Proluctance

    proluctance – n. the paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you’ve been looking forward to – opening a decisive letter, meeting up with a friend who’s finally back in town, reading a new book from your favorite author – perpetually waiting around for the right state of mind, stretching out the bliss of anticipation as long as you can.

    Sometimes the anticipation of something, good or bad, is more impactful than the thing. I certainly can understand not wanting to take a call or open a letter because the result might not be positive, or what I wanted.

    The one place I certainly see this is with books. I have a few authors that I just buy their new books, often pre-ordering them. Lee Child is one and I often pre-order his books weeks or months in advance. However, when they come, I don’t always start reading them.

    Sometimes I might be in the middle of something else, but quite a few times I’ve saved the book for my next long flight. I tend to take a 4+ (or often 8+) hour flight every quarter, so I’ve saved a few books until I knew I’d be stuck in a seat. In fact, the latest one, The Secret, was one of those. It came in late Oct 2023, and I knew I had a few trips scheduled in the next few weeks, so I delayed reading this until I was headed to the PASS Summit in November.

    To help build my own anticipation and feed my proluctance, I re-read a couple of his older books in the meantime Winking smile

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Adding Git LFS Support – #SQLNewBlogger

    I got this message recently while committing some changes:2024-01-29 10_04_16

    This post shows my work in adding Git LFS support to GitHub.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. You can see all posts on Git as well.

    Downloading Git LFS

    The first thing to do is follow the URL from above: https://git-lfs.com/

    Once there, I clicked the download link. I also saw this message: Git LFS security update: Windows users should update to 3.1.3 or newer. I had never installed this, but there is a security issue, so if you are using this, or know someone, let them know to patch.

    This is a simple install, so I ran it and the installed quickly completed. There are no choices here, just accept the EULA.

    2024-01-30 11_03_03

    Once this is done, I followed the instructions from the site. First, I had to close and re-open my CMD window to detect this. Once I did this, I could run

    git lfs install

    This worked fine.

    2024-01-30 11_03_46

    Once this was done, I changed to one of my repos where I have a large PowerPoint file. I added this for a conference that didn’t have download support, but I may do this in other repos to make it easy for attendees to see code and PPT together.

    In the repo, I added lfs tracking for all PPTXs. I likely will add a few other decks in here for different conferences, so I’ll includes this as a general tracking item.

    2024-01-30 11_04_27

    This alters the .gitattributes file, so that needs to be tracked and added to the repo. I’ll do that and commit my changes.

    2024-01-30 11_05_18

    There you go. I’m not commited and tracking large files, or at least PPTXs with lfs support. Hopefully my laptop survives as I did this on an airplane :).

    What is LFS Support?

    This is an extension to git that makes storing large binary files, and diffing them, more efficient. Large files can be inefficient to transfer and store compared to small files, and many file systems, and tools, sometimes adjust the way they work to manage these differently. SQL Server did this with FileStream/FileTable, which works well for some sizes of files, but it inefficient for others. In fact, if you have smaller files  (< 256kb I think), those are better just stored in varbinary columns and streamed through TDS.

    The extension says this should allow you to keep your repo at a more manageable size. I’m assuming this means some sort of compression and diff storage for binaries, as opposed to complete copies of the entire file(s). This should be faster to push/pull as well.

    SQL New Blogger

    This post was interesting to me. As soon as I realized this was something that might improve the way git works for me, I decide to shoot some screenshots as I enabled this. I downloaded the binary and sketched a few sentences on this post before I got on a plane.

    I’d saved the web page for the extension, and so I took about 15 minutes to do the install, shoot the screens, and then type up the above description.

    This is s a good example of adding something to my development toolbox that might benefit my team, and make it easier for others do deal with large binary files. You can do this as well to show you’re learning and growing. Even more bonus points if you go through your IT group for permission, document some of those interactions, and show that you know how to work with other teams.

    Fortunately, I don’t need to do that as this isn’t a domain managed laptop 😉

  • Getting Away from Work

    A bit over a week ago, the volleyball team my wife and I coach won their first tournament of 2024. We’ve had an up and down year, and been close to one win, but the kids hadn’t been able to put together enough good things to win until then.

    2024-02-15 09_53_25-Panther Volleyball Head Coaches _ BAND

    Today we’re finishing the annual three day local President’s Day tournament. As I write this on Friday, I have no idea how we’ll do. We have a couple kids recovering from illness, and one from injury, so fingers crossed things go well.

    Actually, things will be great. I’m not overly concerned about wins or losses here, and however things go, kids will learn some lessons, either from success or failure.

    And that’s life.

    A lot of the skills I’ve learned at work in communicating, teaching, getting along with others, they come into play here. At the same time, the coaching skills I’ve learned, are applicable to work situations.

    The key thing is this isn’t work (not really). It’s a break away from technology. I take stats on paper, I’m in a room with a lot of others, and we’re laughing, crying, having fun, struggling, but in a very different way from the time at my desk.

    Hopefully you have some nice breaks away from work as well.