Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • My T-SQL Tuesday #129 Time Capsule

    This month the T-SQL Tuesday invitation comes from tsqltuesdayTamara Clark. I strong-armed Tamara last fall, along with her husband, into hosting this year. She came through, with a great topic given the state of the world.

    She asks us to write about what we’d put in time capsule, the items or information that goes into a #sqlcommunity bucket. In some sense, this invitation reminds me of Brent’s reminder post to himself.

    Memories of 2020

    What do I remember about this year? First, a lot of vacation for me. My employer, Redgate Software, gives a sabbatical every five years. It’s a great perk for employees that stick around, and it has helped me recharge and refresh. I think I was the last one to get a sabbatical this year while the offices were open, however, there are other companies that take care of employees, and my first memory is a reminder of this. Maybe some future person opening this capsule will think about asking their organization for this.

    The second thing is that I won’t go into an office this entire year. I didn’t get any visits before lockdown, and we’ve closed our offices for the year. That’s a first for me in over a decade. However, the next thing I want to remember from this year is that so many companies are realizing that work from home (WFH) not only works, but lots of people are very productive. We can rethink our costs in buildings, commutes, living locations, and more. Redgate has traditionally not allowed anyone to avoid the office. There are a few of us that have been exceptions over the years, but 90% of our employees have been expected to show up at the office every week.

    That’s changed, and it will change our culture and organization in the future.

    The last thing to put in this time capsule is the importance of social contact and togetherness. I’ve missed a lot of this across the five months, to the point I work to see some people locally every couple weeks. I love my family, but I miss the social contact I used to get regularly, whether traveling to a SQL Saturday, visiting an office, maybe working in a library or Starbucks for a few hours, or just at a movie theater.

    We need more social contact, or at least, I do.

  • Fixing Broken Pip

    I’ve got Python 3.8 on my machine, and recently I got a note that my pip version was old. I tried to upgrade PIP recently with this command:

    c:\python38\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip

    This resulted in an error. When I got the error, which I didn’t save, I tried again from an admin console, but got this: 

    # c:\python38\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
    c:\python38\python.exe: No module named pip

    That is frustrating. In searching around, I found an issue that a broken upgrade from Windows may cause Pip to get lost. As a result, I need to get pip reinstalled. This post shows how to get this, with a quick curl and python script execution.

    Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1840k  100 1840k    0     0  1840k      0  0:00:01 --:--:--  0:00:01 2103k

Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# python get-pip.py
Collecting pip
  Using cached pip-20.2.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.5 MB)
Collecting wheel
  Downloading wheel-0.34.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (26 kB)
Installing collected packages: pip, wheel
Successfully installed pip-20.2.1 wheel-0.34.2

Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# pip install tweepy

    That worked, and allowed me to do what I wanted, which was get the tweepy module.

    Now to do a little Python work.

  • Daily Coping 10 Aug 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to breathe. In for a count of 3, hold for 3, exhale for 3, and pause for 3. Repeat for a few minutes.

    I practice yoga regularly, and across a few years, I actually started to believe and trust that my breath mattered. Too often breathing is a secondary, albeit necessary, activity while exercising. We breathe because we have to, not because we consciously focus on it.

    My wife suggested this, as something she does with her students when they get stressed with horses. Slow down and pause by breathing. Specifically, count to three as you breathe in. Then hold your breath for an equal count. Exhale for the same count, and then pause before you take another breath for the same count.

    It’s surprising how much concentration this takes, and also how it will relax you and slow your heart rate. Take a few minutes and try this today.

    For me, I do this regularly now, especially when I feel too busy and stressed, or I’m unsure of what to do next. I get the paralysis from too many choices at times, and stopping to breath for a minute or two can help me relax.

  • Social: Respecting Names

    This is a non-technical post, and my opinion. If you don’t want to read it, please ignore future posts with “Social:” at the start of the title.

    My nickname is Steve. Actually, it’s my middle name, but it’s a name I chose and I decided that I wanted to go by that moniker. I used to dread the first day of school as a kid when teachers would take attendance and use my name. I didn’t want them to use it, and I’ve certainly had my share of giggles or jokes directed my way during my youth. It got to the point where I learned in high school and college to go to class early and have a private moment with a teacher and ask them to call me Steve.

    It was annoying, stressful, and honestly, rarely a problem. However, a few times I had teachers that refused to use nicknames, and I hated going to their classrooms. Heck, I likely thought I hated them. I’m not sure how far that hatred would go in different situations in the real world, but I had no respect for those individuals and tried to never interact with them.

    In some sense, the world has changed a lot. My kids have gone to school with classmates that have all sorts of names, from different cultures and strange spellings. They accept them all and address them however they wish to be addressed.

    To me, that’s one sign of progress. Names that would have been made fun of or blatantly laughed at over and over during my childhood, are just accepted as the way it is. I see this even in my rural county.

    These days in a professional environment, I couldn’t imagine ignoring a co-worker’s wishes. If someone asked me to call them Jack when their name is Joseph or Sally when their name is Sandra, I would. I coached a kid for a couple years as Katie. She asked me at some point to call her Kate, and I did. Her Mom forgot constantly and referred to her as “Katie”, and I could see how annoyed the young lady would get. I remembered my experience and acceded to her wishes.

    When I read Randolph West’s recent article, I was reminded of my youth, reminded of how I wouldn’t ignore the wishes of someone I knew well, and questioned why I, or anyone, wouldn’t just be polite to others and address them as they would prefer.

    I find the idea of referring to a singular person as “they” to be strange. But how hard is that to change? If Randolph asked me to call them “Buddy”, would I object? Why is a pronoun harder than a noun? It’s not, and I’m working to adjust.

    I find the same thing to be true of other references, nouns or pronouns, that people find objectionable. Often I don’t think the term is offensive, but that’s my view. Is it really that hard to change my language, my writing, my speech to treat someone else as they’d like to be treated?

    It’s not. It might be annoying for me. It might be uncomfortable. Heck, I’ll make mistakes. I’ve apologized to Kate a few times. Not that many because I learned quickly, and she was worth the effort to learn to do better.

    I think most of us feel it’s worth the effort for those that we are close to, or that we know. Why would it be harder to adjust for those we don’t know, and respect their wishes.

    I’m sure I’ll mess up with Randolph, but it’s on my mind to do better. I actually typed “him” above and caught myself, adjusting to the unfamiliar “they”. I even learned to ignore the grammar checker and let it know that I know better in this case.

    Learn, adapt, grow. Many of us do this all the time in technology. We ought to do it in our dealings with others as well.