Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • A New Word: the Kinder Surprise

    the kinder surprise – . the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable adults are not less lost than you and your friends, no less petty and obsessive and insecure, which makes you wonder if there are no real adults, because such a thing never actually existed, except in bedtime stories.

    I am not an adolescent, but I realized this early in my career, while working with some other technologists that I expected to know a lot more than I did and be more aware of things they should do to either advance their careers or improve their skills.

    Over the last ten years, more and more I find that most people aren’t really strong, self-confident adults in all aspects of their lives. They might be at home, or at work, or on a sports field, or while playing an instrument, but in some of those areas they are insecure.

    Or lost, or obsessive, or anything else.

    I’ve tried hard to be honest with my kids as they were growing up, letting them know I’m fallible and unsure sometimes. At the same time, I try to help them develop confidence and show when I have that.

    And explain that confidence isn’t’ arrogance. Being confident doesn’t mean I’m sure I’m right about something, but rather I know the pros/cons and what this means in my life. What effects my decisions have and I choose to make them, knowing there is both an upside and downside.

    Few people have figured out most of their life. Many might have figured out little and aren’t really that much different from a teenager.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • A Cloud Dependency Failure from Amazon

    I went to sleep while reading a Kindle book on my phone. I know because my hand dropped and the phone knocked me in the forehead. I set it on the nightstand and went to sleep again.

    I woke up and was planning on reading for a few minutes before starting my Monday. When I opened the Kindle app, it asked me to log in. When I did, Amazon said my account was locked and I needed to check an email. I did, and found one from Amazon.co.uk questioning a purchase I made and asking for me to very an order number and the last 2 digits of a card to charge.

    I wasn’t sure what to do, but since my wife was complaining about her Audible account, I knew I needed to do something.

    I didn’t like the email for multiple security reasons, including not giving me a way to verify the email online. Checking Amazon’s help page said I should have a link in the email to a form. Even when I called the Amazon help line, they said I should have a link when I logged in to do so. I didn’t on either the .com or .co.uk sites, but Amazon Customer Service eventually unlocked my account.

    I wrote about Dependencies in today’s editorial, inspired by this story and the Reddit story linked in there about losing access to Claude. That’s scrary, especially in this new automated world where AI agents might be examining activity and undertake this type of action to prevent other issues. It’s an overreaching type of judgment that starts to expose the dangers of a highly interconnected world.

    I get Amazon might want to ensure my purchase was legitimate and perhaps prevent future orders, but also locking my content away (books, movies, audio, etc.) because of a shopping issue seems extreme.

    It’s certainly my issue, and I’m not sure how I untangle things for the future, but it does make me think about limiting dependencies a bit more in the future. Or at least understanding the dangers of too much on one service.

    Whether that’s the books I read or the services my company gets from any one vendor.

  • A Redgate Data Modeler Gotcha with Relationships

    This happened to me recently after being busy with non-data modeling tasks for a few weeks. I went to add a relationship and was confused about the behavior. Read on to see what happened and what I did.

    This is part of a series on Redgate Data Modeler.

    Adding a Relationship

    I opened one of my models and saw something like this. Note that the Article and ArticleTag entities aren’t related.

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    I decided to add a relationship. This is a Many to Many, so I clicked on that icon in the toolbar.

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    I then clicked on the Article entity and saw this. It’s a self-referencing relationship.

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    What??? I assumed I’d click one entity, then the other. I tried grabbing various elements of the relationship to move them, but nothing worked. I could move them around within the relationship, but not to another entity.

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    I deleted and added this a few times before I decided to check the docs. On this page for relationships, I found my mistake. There is this quote: “If you’ve already selected the tool, simply drag from one entity to another.”

    Aha.

    If I click the toolbar relationship icon, and then drag from one to the other, it works.

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    I suspect this is an artifact of the web controls, but it was weird for me to not be able to alter the relationship targets. Even in the right properties pane, I can’t change this.

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    Summary

    A simple thing, but not quite as intuitive as I’d like. However, one needs to learn to use tools, which means reading docs or using Claude/ChatGPT andfingers crossed

    This is a reminder to drag relationships in your Redgate Data Modeler models and don’t get away from modeling for weeks, like I did.

    Give Redgate Data Modeler a try and see if it helps you and your team get a handle on your database.

    Video Walkthrough

    Here’s a short video of my working with Redgate Data Modeler and changing cardinality.

  • Advice I Like: Celebrate Success

    “On the way to a grand goal, celebrate the smallest victories as if each one were the final goal. That way, no matter where it ends, you are victorious.” – from Excellent Advice for Living

    I believe in celebrating small things. I am a big “smell the roses” and “celebrate your success” even if the bigger part of the success feels like a failure. If I deliver a good demo in a talk, or one of my players makes a good hit/pass/etc., let’s celebrate that. If the rest of the talk wasn’t smooth and people are confused, or we kept hitting the ball in the net, that’s a bit of a failure and something to work on.

    There’s always a bright side and a dim side. One is likely larger, but both are there.

    I think if we look at something in black and white terms, and reduce it to success or failure, then you create a psychology that you win or something wasn’t worth doing. The sports teams, the musicians, the friends I have, my kids, we aren’t defined by whether we win every time. We can’t be the best all the time.

    Even the best of the best isn’t the best most of the time. Tom Brady (7 rings) and Michael Jordan (6 rings) might be considered the best at what they did. However, they played more years (Brady 23, Jordan 15). Were they failures those other years?

    The Beatles had 19 #1 albums, the most of all time. However, they released more. They had lots of #1 songs, but plenty that didn’t get to #1. Were those not worth doing?

    Celebrate your success. You might write a great query, but ultimately there are plenty others that don’t perform well or some might even return the wrong results. Hopefully you’ll fix and improve those, but celebrate the things that go well.

    Work on those that don’t and turn them into victories later.

     

    I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

    To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.