Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • T-SQL Tuesday #124–Query Store in Action

    tsqltuesdayToday is T-SQL Tuesday #124 and I’m dropping a quick post as I’ve had lots of other stuff to do since returning from my sabbatical. Tracy Boggiano is the host this time and she asks about Query  Store.

    A Quick Review

    I don’t use Query Store (QDS) much. I don’t have to deal with the production operations much, and really, I’m not supposed to worry about the SSC servers. We sometimes have bad plans and bad code, but it doesn’t affect the performance of the servers overall (we’re over provisioned) and we use SQLServerCentral as part of our SQL Monitor demo site, so we want some bad stuff showing up.

    5129kPl5kCLGrant wrote a book, SQL Server Query Store in Action, that is on the Kindle Unlimited list. Since I subscribe, I grabbed this last year and dug in on a few airplane flights to see if I’d missed anything about how the QDS works.

    It’s a good intro look at what the QDS is, how it works, and how you can get information out of it. Grant does a good job of digging into the DMVs and helping you to understand what happens outside of the SSMS GUI.

    Grant and our host, Tracy, have another Query Store book that goes into more detail ( and it more recent) if you want to learn more.

    Overall, this is a good basic look at QDS. If you want to get started, and subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, give this a look.

  • Women’s History Month and Being Better

    This month is Women’s History Month, and it’s a chance to stop and think about the impact that women have had in history. After reading Monica Rathbun’s post on being a women in the SQL Server community, I wanted to drop a few notes.

    Personally, I think this month is a good chance for me to think about the impact women have had in history. For example, after seeing Hidden Figures, I stopped and did a little research to see just how impactful women were in the space program, and how little my early education taught me that.

    The more I learn across time and in different places, the more I realize how much we are shaped by the history we learn, and the more I realize how incomplete what we learn can be. We certainly can’t learn everything, but I find more and more that various minorities, genders, and even other cultures (non-US for me) have had an impact I never realized.

    This isn’t to complain or chastise anyone, but rather just an opportunity to stop and take a little time this month to learn more. The Women’s History Month site might be a good place to start.

    Being a Better Community Member

    I’ve had the honor of knowing and working with some amazing women in this business. I hope that I have treated them as peers and the highly knowledgeable and talented professionals that they are. Kalen Delaney, specifically, was one of my heroes and inspirations early in my career, and I’ve been honored to not only meet her, but be able to call her a friend.

    I’ve also seen some poor behavior, with men treating women at events like they are entertainment or potential mates, without understanding these are our peers. While being attracted to others is natural and will happen in any environment, I do think that some people, especially men, forget that they should be careful not to make others uncomfortable, and certainly not unsafe.

    In trying to be better, I know that others of all genders may interact and express themselves differently than I do. I try to ensure I don’t talk over or dismiss the opinions of anyone, but certainly women.

    I’ve been on panels and at events where few, if any, woman are speaking, and I do try to find ways to support others when I can. I also try to be aware of situations where others may feel unsafe and offer to help.

    Mostly, I think the best way to be a better community member to women or minorities is to just be professional. We would assume a new employee at our organization was competent and deserved to be there until they prove otherwise. Just do the same thing for anyone you meet at an event and try to let go of biases and preconceived notions.

  • Setting 2020 Learning Goals

    I deliberately didn’t set any goals at the start of 2020 since I was taking six weeks off for a sabbatical. That’s done, and it’s time to look forward.

    I know I have a few things that will be important for work. Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL will be on the list as we expand and try to sell more database development tools. We’re also working hard on improving SQL Monitor, so finding a way to improve me query tuning, analysis, and monitoring skills will exist.

    The goals I want to set here will be more personal goals that may relate to my career, but they’ll not necessarily be things I do at work. I’ll carve out some time elsewhere to get through these.

    Reading

    I like reading, and do a lot of us to escape and relax. I completed around 120 books last year, but almost all were fictional or non-technology books. I had hoped to get through 6 tech books, but that didn’t work.

    This year I’m going to scale back and tackle this in two ways. First, I want to get through at least 3 tech books that relate to specific coding or other skills. I’ve still got a couple from last year, including a Power BI one, so that’s one goal.

    The other one will be 2 career related tech books. I started Making Work Visible, and I need to finish that, along with another one.

    Goal:

    • 3 technical books
    • 2 non-tech, related books

    Projects

    I do a lot of demo stuff and build lots of PoC type things, but I need a couple projects. Specifically, I want to get projects done that will help at work, but will be useful in some way to me, or perhaps even others. With that in mind, and dovetailing slightly with those items above, I want to tackle these three projects and get them in a somewhat useable state:

    • A Power BI report that updates from a database
    • A mobile app reading data from somewhere
    • A website that showcases changes and data from a database.

    Not big projects, but getting something organized and relearning some tech about reporting and coding is important to me. I have a few rough ideas for which topics to use for these, but I want to try some basic PoC and see how things go.

    Checking In

    I think I need to check in monthly with these goals and start to see how I’m making progress. I’ll set reminders weekly to spend time here and then monthly to update some stats on where I am.

    I think this feels slightly ambitious, but we’ll see how 2020 goes. Hopefully better than 2019.

  • The Sabbatical Part Deux Review

    I just completed my second sabbatical break this week. Redgate Software is an amazing employer and we give employees a six week sabbatical every five years. I was overdo, and finally took mine in Jan/Feb of this year, with the third one coming up in 3 1/2 years. In any case, all the posts tagged Sabbatical and named “Part Deux” documented this break.

    I had written about my plan before starting the break. This time I wasn’t as structured as I was for the first one, but overall, I think things worked out well. I dropped a few thoughts in an editorial, but this post looks back at how I did with my initial plans.

    Guitar

    I think I did best here. I played most days, often for an hour or more. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, and even worked through parts of a few courses. I’d subscribed to GuitarJamz late last year and started building up some strength and calluses in my fingers. I worked through some exercises and learned some songs. I’ve followed Marty Schwartz on YouTube for years, and this was a good time to focus.

    I also discovered Six String Fingerpicking and started working through some of his all time top songs. I managed to work through the top ten, though I just barely know them. I’m not that good with all of them, but my wife did enjoy hearing me play. She thinks I improved quite a bit.

    This was a random assortment of songs, and I added a few more in there. What I think I did well was learn these things at a competent, not performing, level:

    • Blackbird
    • True Colors
    • Everybody Hurts
    • Wonderful Tonight
    • Ain’t No Sunshine
    • Wherever You Will Go
    • Every Breath You Take
    • 12 Bar Blues progression

    I lightly knew these songs, but I improved quite a bit and learned a few things I had been playing wrong/poorly:

    • More Than Words
    • Fast Car
    • Landslide
    • House of the Rising Sun
    • Good Riddance
    • Iris
    • Hey There Delilah
    • Hallelujah
    • Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
    • I Walk the Line
    • Strong Enough
    • All My Loving
    • With a Little Help From My Friends

    Lots of improvement here, and a good hobby I’ve enjoyed. Looking forward to taking this further in the future.

    The Basement

    I had hoped to not only clean the basement, but rework some framing and perhaps drywall a bit. The reality is that I underestimated the amount of junk and how quickly I’d fill our dumpster. It’s only emptied every other week and with the weather being poor, it wasn’t a good time to try and get a larger container.

    I did clean out about half of it and organized things. I also managed to donate three or four carloads of things to Goodwill and the library. A vast improvement, but not what I wanted. The existing framing was in worse shape than I thought, so I didn’t tackle any of that. Ultimately, I pivoted a bit on this.

    The Garage

    The same thing here as the basement, though this was more weather related. I had hoped to clean out and reorganize some of my workshop areas, but this was a big project and I didn’t have good space to work when the weather was bad. Between cars, my son’s motorcycle and a riding mower, I couldn’t get going. When I was ready, it was freezing in there, so I abandoned most of this.

    A failure, a bit, in my mind.

    Barn Projects

    One of the things I didn’t plan was barn/ranch projects for my wife. However, I did get a few things done here. I repaired a few of the feeders that I’ve built over the years and I managed to cover a building in metal.

    Perhaps the biggest project was getting an electric winch into the riding arena to raise and lower the door. We’ve done this manually for years, with a hand crank. Every one of us has climbed onto a barrel to lower this slightly, then go unhook the door, then come back and open the door. When we’re done, we reverse that, resulting in four barrel climbs every day or two.

    I replaced this with an electric winch and a remote, so there’s no need to climb, but also we can hook/unhook the door at the door without walking back and forth. My wife’s employees love this.

    I had to engineer a way to attach this winch to the frame, which was custom metalwork for me. I then had to wire this to a battery and add a solar panel to keep it charged.

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    Across the last month, this has worked well and everyone appreciates it. I even pleased myself with my work at the end of the sabbatical, trying to get hay to horses. This was one thing I’m quite proud of.

    I also identified a few other repairs I need to make across the next couple months. These are things I’ve let go and not checked on. I wasn’t aware how bad things had gotten with all my travel, but now I know I need to focus on some side projects around work.

    Health and Illness

    I wanted to take care of myself during the break, hitting the gym, getting massages, and snowboarding. I ended up with these stats in six weeks:

    • 5 massages
    • 7 days snowboarding
    • 28 gym workouts

    Good progress. In 42 days, I had 35 workouts. Not fantastic, but good. The limiting factor in most of this was my health. I fought a cold for about 2 1/2 weeks, just struggling to get healthy. It only knocked my down in bed for a couple days, but I was moving slow.

    Overall, this wasn’t much better than I might have taken care of myself while at work, other than the massages. Those are hard to fit in. Not great progress, but a lot less stress.

    That might be the best part of this break. My stress and concern with getting things done, and having deadlines, was low. I still had coaching duties, and I kept fairly busy, but I could let things slide a bit if I needed to, like the garage.

    This was a fantastic break. After my first sabbatical, I wasn’t sure what to do the second time. Now I know I don’t necessarily need a plan, but the break will do me good.