Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • A Las Vegas Break

    Only a little break for me. I’m actually heading to Las Vegas today for  the Red Rock Rave volleyball tournament with a team of 13 year olds. We’ve been pushing them at practice for a few weeks, so hopefully they’re ready to compete and we break into the top half tomorrow.

    That’s usually our goal as the teams I coach aren’t often the top athletes in Colorado. If we finish 1st or 2nd in our pool tomorrow, then we’ll be in the top half for Sunday and Monday. We did this at Crossroads in Jan and the RMR Showdown in Feb. The second day can get rough, but we’re learning and improving each time.

    The tournament finished Monday and my wife and I are staying until Tues to get a little break. During tournament days, we’re very busy and it’s real work. We don’t get a lot of down time, and we are constantly searching for ways we can coach better and help the team improve. Plus the 15 year olds from our club are going and we coached 3 of those girls at 13, so we’ll stick around and watch them after we’re done playing.

    It’s great to get away from technology and do something in the real world. I always like those moments when I get away from computers, and I’m looking forward to the break.

  • Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up

    I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a few people thinking and commenting on their own experiences. I decided to write a few posts supporting the ideas in the presentation, which my wife and I have used to both drive our careers forward while enjoying our lives.

    Just this week, I had an example.

    This is a series of posts on finding balance in your career.

    It Starts with a Picture

    My daughter told me this happened Monday afternoon. This is one of our horse feeders, and as you can see, the bottom has fallen out.

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    This happens periodically, but it was unexpected. In this case, I’d returned from a week and a half of travel, and I needed to try and get prepped for some additional travel the following week.

    In other words, I had plenty of work to do, lots of commitments in life already in place, and now something new pops into my life.

    This isn’t critical, but it is something I need to get done before I leave again, which left me limited time around work, coaching commitments a few nights a week, trying to get time to exercise to maintain my health, cooking for the family while I’m here, and, of course, getting time to relax.

    I decided I’d have to find time in a couple ways. First, I got up a little early, 30 minutes, the next day and started working. When my daughter texted that she was getting the tractor out, I took a break and went outside to meet her and bring the feeder back to the house.

    I then evaluated what was needed and realized I needed some wood from the hardware store. Fortunately, I had a meeting scheduled that I didn’t need to speak in, so I started to town while listening to the meeting in the car.

    Multi-tasking FTW.

    I had almost completed my trip to town when the meeting ended. I drove back and went back to work, handling a few tasks, editing an article, etc. Once I thought I had gotten most things done for the day, I took a break.

    It took about 75 minutes to cut some wood and re-attach the pieces and parts in the feeder. I’d cut into my day a bit, but fortunately work is flexible and I can work a little longer on Wednesday to make up for the time missed.

    That extra work will cut into my time to relax, but this is an unexpected issue, and I have to trade time somewhere. Making adult choices, I flexed work to get something in my life done sooner, and spread that flex across two days so that I wasn’t overloaded.

    Less time to relax, but that happens some weeks. Especially with horses.

  • Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger

    I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try and answer it myself. I assumed this would be easy, and it was, but I used some AI help to make it very quick to get the value and learn something.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    Checking for Sequences

    I know I’ve done some testing lately with sequences for a customer, so I decided to ask Prompt AI to help. I connected to a database and asked this question after clicking ALT+Z.

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    I got this response, which I executed before accepting the code. One thing I like about SQL Prompt is I can execute code and then adjust my prompt (or paste in an error). As you can see, I have 3 sequences in this database. I get a bunch of the meta data, including the current_value.

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    However, is that the next value or the last one? It could be interpreted multiple ways. I could look this up, but I decided to ask again. I accepted the code, then wrote a quick SQL statement to get the next value. If you’ve never done this, you might not know how sequences work, which is a different issue. In my case, a “se” tab, “ne” tab “i” got e this code. I then asked to find this.

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    UPDATE: From this article, the current_value has an issue. For new sequences, it shows the starting value, even if that value hasn’t been used, so the last_used_value is a better choice.

    SQL Prompt AI returned this query, which gets me the current_value, but I know that. I decided to ask for an explanation rather than Google or work my way through MSLearn.

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    The explanation is good. It’s not the current value + 1 it’s the current value + increment, which is a subtlety that some people might miss.

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    Let’s test this. I wrote some code and then executed it. I get 17, which makes sense. The current value (seen above) is 15 and the increment is 2.

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    Problem solved. This short session likely will help me remember this detail for future code (or prompts).

    SQL New Blogger

    This post took me about 8 minutes to setup the code, capture the images, and write this up. I’ve done a lot of these, but I showed how to investigate a question, use AI for help, and then make sure the AI is actually giving me something good.

    You could write these types of posts and show your fluency with both data engineering and AI assistance. Take a minute and start writing some blogs that showcase how your skills and career are growing.

  • The Book of Redgate: No Politics

    In today’s world, this might mean something different, but in 2010, we had this value:

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    In our context, this was about being open and transparent. This is the text from the facing page:

    No gossiping, no intrigue, no pussy-footing around problems and no telling people what you think they want to hear whist privately disagreeing. We will be transparent in our dealings.

    In a small company (2010 must have been 200-ish people), this made a lot of sense and I think overall we minimized politics. I don’t know this will ever be a “no politics” world for Redgate or any other, but we were better about publicly disagreeing.

    I think we’ve lost a little of this over the years, as I see more people talking a bit inconsistently to smaller, private groups than they do to large ones. I try hard not to do this, though I’m sure my open-ness sometimes rubs people the wrong way.

    I’m OK with some conflict. I’m also OK debating and disagreeing about what we do or why/how we do things. I think it’s healthy to do so.

    I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.