Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 25 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to share a helpful quote, picture, or video with a friend.

    I usually enjoy sharing quotes with friends on their birthdays. Those of you who know me on Facebook usually get one.

    However, I’m sharing one today that I think is helpful to me, both in my career in technology, in coaching, and in my endeavors:

    “What do you do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” – Dean Smith

    It’s a very DevOps way to view the world, and I like this one.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • Daily Coping 24 Oct 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to find joy in tackling something that you have put off.

    I on not a bad procrastinator, but I do put plenty of things off. Usually this is because I try to always have work done for the next week, which means I am looking forward two or three weeks all the time.

    That usually gives me a bit of time to procrastinate if I don’t feel like working on a task.

    This is often the way I tackle ranch tasks, as we often can look forward and plan out fixing or improving something. Recently, I took time to handle a few things that I’ve been delaying.

    First, I changed oil in the UTVs on the ranch. We use these things regularly, and I tend to handle the maintenance. However, I don’t love changing oil. It’s easy and not that time consuming, but it’s dirty and annoying, and I avoid it. I took time to just deal with a couple vehicles this past weekend.

    The second thing is that I put an electric winch on a door during the pandemic. It’s worked OK, but it hasn’t been completely stable. It twists a little under high wind loads, and I end up going out to tight and re-align it at times. I had purchased a couple brackets, but needed a few new bolts and then time to mount those under the winch. I took time to just knock this out as well.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • From Manual to DevOps at the Data Community Summit

    This year the annual PASS Data Community Summit is hybrid, both in-person and virtual. It’s exciting to have this coming back and I look forward to seeing people in Seattle if you can come.

    You can register today and save with these codes:

    • $200 off the in-person, 3 day conference in Seattle: SJSUMMIT93

    I’m doing a precon on the journey from a manual process to an automated DevOps one. So many customers I work with are dealing with these issues, trying to decide how to move from their existing process, whatever it is, to a more reliable, repeatable, automated one. With Grant and a few fellow Redgaters, we’ll be starting from nothing, as many of us do. Then every 30-ish minutes we’ll be deploying our code in whatever process we’ve built to that point.

    Hopefully, this will be fully automated with a DevOps style flow by the end of the day (fingers crossed).

    We’ll be using the Redgate Flyway Enterprise suite of products, talking about the concepts that are useful to help you build and deploy database code in a team.

    Join us, or one of the other great pre-cons and I’ll see you in Seattle.

  • EV Charging Challenges

    I saw an article on the state of EV charging and what Ford is doing. First, I think it’s great that Ford (and others) are trying to tackle this. I don’t love the idea of each manufacturer doing this, though if they have interoperable stations, that’s not bad.

    Second, this is one of the reasons I got a Tesla. Before I had an EV, I worried about needing to charge when I was driving around. This “range anxiety” had me stop considering the Polestar and Mach-E because I worried about finding a compatible, working charger.

    This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

    Stats

    Now that I’ve had the Tesla for over a year, this what my charging stats have been:

    2022-09-15 09_17_36-Charging Stats - Grafana — Mozilla Firefox

    I’ve tried two non-Tesla chargers and gotten no charge from them. They showed:

    • incredibly long charging times
    • never got through the handshake to start charging in 5 minutes.

    In both cases, I moved a bit further away to a Tesla Supercharger. Neither was a crisis, but it was inconvenient.

    However, since those experiences, I’ve only rarely needed Supercharging and those were on trips to the mountains. The Silverthorne charger was needed, but the Idaho Springs one was for peace of mind. I’d likely have gotten home, but didn’t want to chance it and had time.

    A New Mindset

    Perhaps the most interesting thing about owning an EV is that I essentially have a full tank of fuel every morning. I plug in and charge at night, and I’m full. That means I have my 300miles of range every day.

    That’s unlike a gas car where I often wouldn’t think about range because if I started the day with 1/4 tank, I’d just get gas somewhere. Rarely was my tank full, though we usually try to stay well above a 1/4 tank at the ranch.

    Now I have a full set of fuel every day (well, usually 80%, so 250miles) and I really never drive further. And I drive all over the Denver area on a regular basis, especially during coaching season. I’m never really concerned about range anymore, though I do keep an eye on it, same as I do for gas fuel.

    That’s still slightly strange to me.

    Battery Degradation

    Some people have worried about battery degradation. In fact, I’ve seen lots of posts in the Tesla groups I’m a part of about people seeing some low degradation. There are also no shortage of random FUD complaints from people who don’t have EVs, but hate them

    In fact, I ran things down deliberately the other day to 11% ( I was hoping for sub-10) and then charged to 94%. I’ve heard that it’s a good idea to periodically do this and then recalibrate the battery. This is supposed to help with range.

    2022-09-15 09_41_23-Charges - Grafana — Mozilla Firefox

    I don’t know if this helps because the random watching I do of estimated range still seems to be what I had last year. When I got the Tesla, I believe the range was 315miles. If I look at today, I have the charge at 81%. If I switch to mileage, I see 254 miles. If I take 315*0.81, I get 255, so all seems good.

    Just to test, I charged to 100%. When I do that, I see 328 miles of range. No degradation for me.

    Overall, I think electric cars will dominate in the future, but not everywhere. That makes me wonder if fuel will start to become a challenge at some point and people needing fuel find themselves in the place where people struggling to find a working charger are today.