Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 5 Aug 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to be a realistic optimist. Focus on what could go right.

    I find a lot of people think ahead and get concerned about the downsides. What could go wrong? They find reasons to not do something.

    Of course, there are others that a few that leap first and worry about issues later.

    I tend to be in the first group, though I’ve learned to recognize when I’m not being optimistic, when I am letting fear drive me. That has helped me to have confidence in most things going right.

    Which they do. Most of the time things work out fairly well.

    I’m trying to do this with SQL Saturday. I’m hopeful for the future and events, and understanding when people are hesitant. However, I am confident that more organizers will run events and more people will want to come to live in-person events.

    I’m being optimistic, knowing that this doesn’t apply to everyone and I have empathy for the reality.

  • Daily Coping 4 Aug 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to write down three things you are grateful for today.

    I’m grateful for a lot of things, but the things that stand out today.

    1. My kids are happy with us parents. They are all at home this summer, though the older two are living with us for the foreseeable future. We love that, and love having them around for dinner, movies, or just some conversation. They seem to enjoy being around us, which at 23 and 30 is not something I see often with others.

    2. My health. I’ve had a couple minor things with health, but fairly minor. Those issues have prevented me from much gym/yoga/walking time for a couple months. I appreciate more and more my health and the things I can do (and I’m looking forward to).

    3. The Tesla. I’m lucky that I can afford a car like this. Every time I drive it, it’s a fun experience. I can cruise easily, or I can make my stomach jump by pushing hard on the acceleration.

    Lots more, but those are on the forefront of my mind today.

  • Solar Production After 5 Months in Power BI

    I’ve been tracking my usage and comparing that with the estimates for my solar power system. I wrote about the database design and tracking the usage and some of the estimates.

    In this post, I want to look at the reporting in Power BI. Here is my refreshed comparison report as of Jul 31.

    2022-08-01 10_17_38-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

    I have 3 sections here. At the bottom right is a table with a range setting that shows raw data. I need to write about the import process for this data, but that’s for another day.

    At the top, I have the running total of production (light blue) and estimated production (dark blue). The first month or so we were close to the estimate, but we started to outperform the estimate regularly, which is good news. The Tesla wasn’t in the model or estimate, and it uses some power, so it’s good the system is ahead.

    The bottom left is the month by month comparison, which you can see is a fairly steady overproduction each month.

    The configuration is fairly simple for this report. For the line chart, I’ve set the x-axis as the date. My Y-Axis has the sum of both of the raw production numbers. This gives me a running total across time.

    2022-08-01 10_32_02-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

    The lower left month by month bar chart is similar, but I’ve added the month, which separate this into buckets.  This lets me see if a particular month’s comparison is hidden in the line chart by the long term running total.

    2022-08-01 10_36_16-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

    I can’t change much, but this does help me to look for anomalies and possible production issues. Perhaps a panel isn’t performing or there is another issue. By glancing at this every few days, I can decide if I need to look at more detail on the system.

    Hopefully the company doing monitoring would detect issues, but this is a good double check for me and it also gives me long term data backup in case they have issues.

  • Daily Coping 3 Aug 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to choose to see something good about what has gone wrong.

    Recently we had to replace our refrigerator. The old one, well, not really old. Four years old, but it died. The manufacturer couldn’t fix it, so they have us a settlement that we used to buy a new one.

    However. It was a pain. We had to get a new one before we got money for the old one. We had to keep the old one around until we heard from the company, and we ended up throwing out some food.

    There were some good things that came out of this:

    We cleaned the fridge out and a number of things that were thrown away weren’t needed or haven’t been something we thought to replace.

    This spurred me to spend time getting generator maintenance scheduled. Something didn’t work right at the end of the winter, and I’ve been wanting to get this going again.

    This also helped me appreciate how lucky we are. We had an old fridge in the garage that we could use for some things. A pain to go outside and get things and take them back, but that’s a first world problem. I tried to remind the family of that.