Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • PASS Summit – Day 1 Keynote

    How can you miss the audience so badly? I can completely understand me making a mistake. It’s just me, I  am distracted by other work, I get little feedback from people whose opinions I ask, and I’m just one person. But Microsoft? Surely they have a team of people to examine the message, think about the audience and try to pick a topic and demos that matter to the group getting the message.

    I arrived late at the keynote, after SQL Run and doing a bit of work. It felt like lots of marketing talk, but the interesting thing is that the next version of SQL Server will be released in the first half of 2012 and will be called SQL Server 2012. I was hoping for a return to realistic names that make sense, with SQL Server 11, but the marketing people are likely too scared to change anything.

    SQL Server v11 will be SQL Server 2012. That will be fun. And confusing. And an endless source of difficult discussions among professionals. I was hoping for a return to reasonable naming. We got Windows 7, why not SQL Server 11?

    Oh well, we’ll get used to it and I suppose we’ll have SQL2K12 on Win2K8 or Win2K12 as well. Maybe that won’t be so bad.

    Microsoft appears to recognize there’s more of a world out there than their own products. They’ve acknowledged things at times, but for the most part keynotes seem to ignore the fact that we want and need to use other products. That didn’t stop the keynote from saying that the “eye-apps” (iApps) aren’t the only thing out there, and the keynote noting that we want tablets AND slates (who wants slates?) and a few other subtle digs at the Apple and Android worlds. It’s a transition to the Hadoop connectors have been released for SQL Server and SQL Azure.

    Denny Lee of the CAT team comes out to talk about terabytes of data from web logs needing to be analyzed. A demo of analysis in Hadoop for Windows. 100% compatible with other platforms, which I hope is true. Adding any extensions or additions that aren’t in the *nix versions would be bad.

    The demo pulls Hadoop data into Powerpivot for analysis. I guess this makes sense, but there’s a bunch of scenarios and information being shared that makes this too complex a demo for me. It’s just as contrived as most of the simpler ones, but it’s hard to see if there is a lot of value here. I guess if you use Hadoop, getting the data into Powerpivot could be nice, but hard to see how this makes SQL Server better for this crowd.

    Next we go to showing some data explorer, more demos, but my attention wanes. I’m not sure why the keynotes are talking around SQL Server. I understand that self-service BI is important, but I’m not sure that pushing it so heavily is what this audience wants to see. I don’t know how many people outside of the SQL Server pros are that interested. This seems like a talk more for executives or business users, not the IT folk.

    It feels like a miss. I know Microsoft wants to get the message out to the wider world, and there will be press people reporting on this, but I’m still surprised. The technical people want to see something that relates to them, not just to their clients. Show us something that’s of interest to us, as the developers, architects, and administrators of database systems, not as the end users.

    The press won’t beat you up, they’ll ignore you. You can always give them another presentation, demo, or press release later, but the technical people, the ones that will advocate and push for upgrades should get some attention while they’re in the room, with some explanations and talks about topics that capture their interest, not showcase features that don’t require them to advance in their careers.

  • Practicing for DR

    One of the sayings that I’ve heard a few times from professional atheletics is this:

    “Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they don’t get it wrong.”

    Most of us working in technology would like to think that we’re professionals, but do we really practice restores, practice recovering systems, practice reconfiguring things until we don’t get it wrong?

    I don’t think most of us do. We give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, we may examine why, but we often don’t go through the exercise enough to ensure that we really can do it well when there is pressure.

    You can’t practice constantly, that’s not practical, but you ought to take a regular look at different systems, different problems, and try to reset them up every quarter or so in order to be prepared. Even if it’s something you do informally, you ought to ensure that you understand how your scripts work to automate restores, reconfigure systems, restore databases and logs, etc. With the advances in virtualization, you can even do this on workstations, setting up complex, multi-server environments on ordinary hardware.

    It’s good practice for your skills and your career, and it might make you shine when there is an issue.

  • SQL Run was awesome

    When Jes Borland suggested we do a group SQL Run in Seattle, I was thinking that we’d have a few people. Allen White and I run together when we’re in the same town, and with all the people that ran the Portland half and full marathons this past weekend, I was thinking that we’d have 10 or 12 people for the run.

     

    I arrived at the Sheraton around 6:45, and there was one guy outside. I was thinking, OK, a nice small group run and I’m early. He told me that there were people inside waiting, and when I walked in, I saw this:

    That’s me hidden in the right corner.

    There were about 20-25 people and across the next 10 minutes the crowd grew to about 40-50 people. Hard to tell, but it was a large crowd. A few people I expected to come didn’t because of the timing. We were finishing around 7:30 or so and with breakfast ending at 8am and the keynote at 8:15, that doesn’t leave a lot of time to cool down, shower, and more.

    One reason I didn’t accept a spot at the blogger table. Totally worth it to jog with the crowd down to the water and along the boardwalk and piers North of Pikes Place Market. I ended up moving along different people at different times, chatting as we lightly jogged around.

    It was a great time, with a nice Seattle morning, cool, but not cold, only a little wind and no rain. A pleasant way to start the day.

  • The Khan Academy

    It’s completely unrelated to work, though there is a computer science section at The Kahn Academy.

    I can’t take credit for this, that goes to Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) for turning me onto the Khan Academy. It’s similar to what we built at SQL Share, but much broader in scope, and much more successful. Hopefully we’ll rectify that at some point.

    It’s almost an online learning site with a series of videos on a variety of topics. It was built with the idea that we can provide a free, high quality education to anyone that can view the videos. Students can sign up and pace themselves through the classes. Parents, coaches, teachers, can watch students and build a course with a series of steps.

    Or you can do what I did, just watch a few videos. I saw some algebra ones that I might show my kids when they need math help, and I started going through the calculus ones, as a brush up on my skills. I loved math in school and thought I’d play around with some of the topics and exercises.

    Check it out and see what you think.