Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 14 Mar 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 take three calming breaths at regular intervals during the day.

    This is an easy one for me. Since I’ve been practicing yoga for 10-12 years, I often find myself taking more conscious breaths at times. Fill up deeply, hold briefly, and slowly let them out.

    It’s amazing how calming 3-4 deep breaths can be.

  • A Frozen UI at 65MPH

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

    I was driving home from a ski trip recently on I-70 E in Colorado. My wife wanted to call my daughter and went to switch the connected Bluetooth device from my phone to hers. She connected her phone and made the call, but she couldn’t get the audio to come out of the car speakers. She ended up talking directly on the phone while trying to disconnect and reconnect a few times.

    At some point my wife finished her call and went to click the icon on the Tesla screen to disconnect and nothing worked. She tried pressing the car menu button, the spotify icon, even the climate controls. Nothing worked.

    At this point I was driving 65mph on a busy highway, with snow on the side shoulders. Not the place to worry.

    I knew the car should keep running, but there is something a little uneasy about not being able to change any settings while driving down the road. We debated what to do for a few minutes. I knew there was a reset procedure, but I wasn’t interested in testing it while driving.

    We kept going down the highway, planning on taking an exit and then rebooting. As my wife searched for information online as to what to do, the screen actually restarted itself. Not the full restart I’ve seen with software updates, but apparently a soft restart of the UI. After 10-15s after the screen went dark, I had a working UI again.

    Hard and Soft Reboots

    We looked up the procedure and there are both hard and soft reboots of the car. A soft reboot can be done in the Model Y by holding both steering wheel buttons down until the car resets. This should only be done while the car is stopped, which is what I expect.

    A hard reset, and power cycling the car, comes from the UI itself. You should allow the car to be powered down for 2+ minutes before doing anything.

    In general, I’m not overly worried about the UI rebooting, but I do think that this is a case where a secondary screen, running an independent OS, would be good to keep the driver informed of at least speed.

    Am I Concerned?

    Not now. The car seems to work independently of the UI, which is what I would hope was the case. It’s lightly disturbing, but that’s about it. Now I know what to expect.

    Software Updates

    Usually there’s a notification in my app of a software update. It also appears in the UI. I used the UI to do one manually, watching the screen give status info similar to how a PC or mobile does. Very uninteresting.

    For all of them since the first one, I usually just approve the update in the app at night. The car is plugged in and I haven’t worried about watching it. I’ll check in the am, and I haven’t had issues.

    I do see UI elements moved, which is slightly annoying, but not critical. Mostly I watch the release notes would better use images to describe movement of stuff so I don’t have to hunt around. It took me 3 or 4 minutes to find my steering wheel heater after one update, which was annoying and distracting as I kept looking at various stop signs during a drive.

  • Daily Coping 11 Mar 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 start today appreciating your body and health and the fact you are alive.

    I do this often. I’m in the midst of working to lose some weight and get healthier. This is a slightly stressful place as I have an appointment scheduled to re-test my blood in a week or so.

    However, every day I can go to the gym, I can practice yoga or lift weights, I’m grateful. Each time I think about the things I want to change, I think about how lucky I am to not have any major chronic issues.

    Maybe not every time, but many times. I do think that I am lucky to not have had any major health issues, and I survived COVID (twice) without long term effects. I’m also fairly healthy, fit, and happy to be alive.

  • ETL v ELT

    This is part of a series on my preparation for the DP-900 exam. This is the Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals, part of a number of certification paths. You can read various posts I’ve created as part of this learning experience.

    I don’t have an ELT tag, and I’m not likely to make one. I tend to think of ETL as loading data somewhere, even though I know it means more.

    The important concepts for DP-900 here are that ELT is becoming more important and you need to understand what this means. I’ll cover these concepts, but also give a little overlap with where the different Azure services fit in with this.

    ETL

    For most of my career, the pattern for loading data was Extract-Transform-Load. In this pattern we:

    • grab data from a source
    • make changes to clean/change/etc.
    • write to a target (or sink)

    It’s how tools like SSIS work. They connect a source to a target and have a bunch of tasks or transforms in the middle that change the data in some way.

    This is a good pattern for getting the work done when the target system is just built for querying data, such as a data warehouse. It is also good when you need to scrub some data, perhaps for privacy reasons.

    This isn’t a good pattern when you are trying to load data quickly as the transform process takes time.

    ELT

    This is the new way of doing things. I this patter we Extract-Load-Transform, though really, it’s not a pattern that quite makes sense in that the process of moving the data just moves it.

    Here we:

    • grab data from a source
    • write it to a target

    Where’s the transform? Well, that happens on the target, often when someone queries the data. Modern analytic systems, like Snowflake and Synapse, can work with vast quantities of data, often stored in a data lake or blob system, and consume that with powerful computational capabilities. There could be some minor re-shaping of the data on write, but that’s not the idea.

    This is good when you might not read all the data. Why process (transform) what isn’t being read. Before you complain that you should know what is used, none of us know if all our data is being used. Unless we write crappy SELECT * code with no WHERE clauses.

    This is also good when we need to work at speed and privacy isn’t a concern. It’s great for the known formats of files sent to us, as the target system can project a table on top of a ser of files.

    ELT seems to be the current future direction of many analytical and warehouse systems.