Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Goal Progress for Jan 2022

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2022.

    My first update. I spent most of January unwinding slightly and studying. So far, I think I’m doing OK.

    Here are the goals:

    Work

    • DP-900 – Passed
    • DP-300
    • Demo with SQL Server – 5%
    • Demo with PostgreSQL – 0%
    • Demo with MySQL – 0%
    • Feedback book – 68%
    • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy – 0%

    Personal

    • Link Google Sheets to Power BI – 0%
    • Create Report – 0%
    • Create Dashboard – 0%
    • Get people using it – 0%

    Community

      • Support the Colorado groups by speaking twice and helping get one event set up
        – 33%
        • CO Springs event set up
      • Speak at 3 other user groups outside of Colorado – 33%
        • Spoke at DBA Fundamentals group
      • Support SQL Saturdays – Help get 10 events run in 2022
        • two scheduled, 2 more close
      • Volunteer 4 days with Habitat – 0 days

    Grade: B

    A good first month, but I need to keep moving forward in February.

  • Daily Coping 4 Feb 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 ask other people about things they’ve enjoyed recently.

    I love seeing others enjoy life. It could be family, friends, kids I coach, or even random people I might talk to. I rarely engage people, but it can be interesting when I do.

    I thought about this, as the last two years have been times when fewer people are getting away, traveling, or even experiencing life. I mentioned this in other tips, but my wife and I took our kids to Las Vegas for New Year’s Even. The basis for that trip was asking a friend about their Thanksgiving holiday and hearing they’d done something similar with their kids.

    I’ve had a few friends go to Hawaii in 2021, and I’ve always asked them how it went. My wife has never been, and I booked two trips (2020 and 2021), cancelling both because of concerns over how many things might be open for us.

    I’ve chatted with a few others about their travels crossing borders, as I am anxious to get back to visiting new places. I am finding COVID to be more flu-like now with Omicron dominating, and I hope to get to a few new places this year. It’s always interesting to hear people’s thoughts, whether they feel as I do or are more concerned.

    Lastly, I’ve pinged a few people about their outdoor adventures. I am hoping that we have a few new ones this year, so I’m curious how others experiences have gone.

  • Batch, Streaming, and Relational Data

    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.

    The first part of the DP-900 skills document has these items:

    • describe batch data
    • describe streaming data
    • describe the difference between batch and streaming data
    • describe the characteristics of relational data

    These are concepts that are important to this exam. I lightly blew these off when I started studying, but every other person with guides and the practices tests has lots of focus here. I’m glad I spent time here.

    This post covers these concepts a bit. Note, these are more ETL/analytic concepts, not really

    Batch Data

    Most of my career deals with batch data, meaning a bunch of data that arrives at once and is imported into a system. This is different than a connection and query submitted to an OLTP system. The general idea is:

    • Lots of data
    • Processed periodically
    • Latency doesn’t matter.

    Think these key words:

    • Not real-time
    • periodic
    • large/big/lots

    There is an MS Docs article on this. The general idea is that you want to think about a scheduled (or some periodic) processing of lots of data for a purpose.

    Examples of where batch is used.

    • Total up all hours worked last week for employees
    • Load and transform log files from all web servers each day
    • Import files from regional offices into a main database server

    In the analytics space, you’d be using Azure Data Factory (ADF), HD Insight (U-SQL, Hiuve, Pig, Spark), Azure Data Lake (ADLS).

    Streaming Data

    There is a course on this topic. When you think of streaming, think of these key words:

    • real-time
    • stream
    • data processed as soon as created
    • IoT
    • few transactions
    • monitoring or instant decision making

    Streaming is really about time series, about tumbling windows, about data like a stock ticker that you need to constantly and/or quickly process.

    Differences

    These items helped me:

    • Lots of data – Batch
    • Low latency – Stream
    • Long latency, latency doesn’t matter, periodic work – Batch
    • Small, constant sets of data – Stream

    Relational Data

    The workload here is that you are handling regular changes to data, lots of insert/update/deletes, for a business process. Really this means you are thinking some sort of CRUD application the gets and sends data to users in real time, but not with low latency issues. We are thinking a web server, a data entry business app, something that operates on time scales for humans, seconds. Not real time, IoT millisecond work.

  • Daily Coping 3 Feb 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 challenge negative thoughts and look for the upside.

    In a world where controversy, complaints, and negativity are readily available, it’s easy to get down when you look at the news, social media, or even chat with friends online. I find many people present a much poorer version of themselves online. Even in person, often they’ve been affected by the world, so I can find interactions often start of with negativity.

    Personally, I have found that I can get down not only from media and information around me, but also from things not going well for me. Work, coaching, life, all have things that go wrong.

    Note: things lightly go wrong for me. Overall my life is pretty amazing, so I am getting down about little things that in the grand scheme of the world, aren’t that important. I know this.

    For me, and I’ve written about this in a few tips, I had a minor bit of bad news regarding my last health checkup. I’ve made some changes, and with reminders from my wife, am looking forward. I’m not upset that my diet is changed, I’m not overly concerned, and I’m working to keep a few slightly high numbers in perspective. My health isn’t in immediate or immanent danger, cutting back and changing lifestyle isn’t that much of an impact, and missing a few things (some food, alcohol, etc.) really isn’t that bad.

    I’m staying positive, enjoying my gains, letting the feelings of missing things wash over me, experiencing them, and letting go.