Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 8 Jun 2021

    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 re-frame a worry and try to find a helpful way to think about it.

    One of my worries this summer is SQL Saturday and events. The pandemic took a toll on organizers and attendees, with many of them tired of virtual events, along with trepidation about renting space and putting a crowd of people together. I worry about how we restart events.

    However, what I need to do is have empathy that situations are different for many, and that we need to support people in different ways. I also need to remember that many people want to run or attend events, but that patience is needed to get comfortable with the idea of a crowd of people together again.

    It’s helpful to start having conversations and share ideas, get feedback, and understand the challenges people face in us moving forward as a community of free, one-day conferences.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #139–A Hybrid World

    tsqltuesdayIt’s time for T-SQL Tuesday in June 2021, with a new host this time. Ben Wiessman (b | t), who graciously responded to my request to host, and to whom I want to congratulate on an addition to his family.

    In any case, for #139, Ben asks us about hybrid data. He’s a cloud advocate and someone that has been working with Big Data Clusters and Azure Arc. In fact, he’s written books on those topics(Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services Revealed and SQL Server Big Data Clusters), Bid , so I expected a topic related to those.

    Moving to Hybrid

    I haven’t dealt with hybrid in production at all. My work with SQLServerCentral, and much with Redgate and customers, is all either on-premises or in the cloud. All the SSC stuff runs as IaaS, and most of Redgate does. While we have a lot of local workstations and environments for dev, much of the infrastructure is in the cloud, without much hybrid stuff.

    I do see customers that developer locally and deploy in the cloud, which is something I’ve done, but not too often. Most want to do everything in one place. I don’t really consider IaaS as a “hybrid” despite it being in the cloud, because these are just VMs that could be anywhere, and there isn’t any real change if they live in Azure, AWS, or a remote data center my company owns.

    Experimenting in the Cloud

    The exception for me is Spawn. This is Redgate’s research project on hosted cloud databases that you might use for local development. I started working with this when it was early in the lifecycle, and now it’s something that I use regularly.

    Essentially you create a database, and it’s hosted in a container somewhere. You get a connection string back, but the database lives in a cloud service, and this is a hybrid environment.

    It’s an interesting idea, and while I haven’t made any large databases, I do find that the ability to programmatically start a database to be quite fascinating and simple. A few times when I’ve looked to update a demo project, the ease with which I can set up an environment on a new machine is fascinating.

    The team that manages our main demo made a number of changes in 2020. I had scheduled a talk on the platform and realized a week before that the old demo I had was broken. When I contacted them, they gave me these instructions.

    • Update the CLI tool
    • Update my repo from the “demo” branch of the repo
    • Open the folder in VS Code
    • Hit F5

    That’s it and I had a running environment right away. I did a talk on this at ConFoo 2021, and it went well. The ease of getting things running even impressed me, as I hadn’t dealt with the front end side of things as often. Amazing.

    To me, this is where the hybrid cloud gets interesting, when I easily access resources either locally or remotely.

  • Daily Coping 7 Jun 2021

    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 stay positive in your conversations with others.

    This is a good tip for me this time of year. As we wind down volleyball this season, there are some tough conversations to have with kids about their performance and things they need to work on for next year. There are also talks with kids (and parents) that won’t get offered a spot to stay with the team for next year.

    One of the important things I am trying to remember when having hard talks is that I want to emphasize positive things that have happened, note what has worked, and frame issues as opportunities to improve in the future. These are areas of focus that will help improve athletes in the future.

    It can be hard, but it is important to be clear and honest about success and failure, as well as the ways to improve for the future.

  • Daily Coping 4 Jun 2021

    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 help nature in some way, plant something, pick up trash, make a small difference in the world.

    I don’t have a green thumb, and other than cutting the grass, I don’t do a lot of nature work. However, we’ve been composting this last year and trying to take better care of the nature around here.

    I saw this and took some time to walk around, cleaning up trash that’s gotten loose on the property. I also decided to get a small tree and plant it in the yard. I’m hoping that this will survive, thrive, and grow, but we’ll see if how things go across the next year.