Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Having Data Modeling Standards

    While working with a customer recently, they mentioned that they have certain standards for their objects. They require a PK, and it’s the name of the table with _PK added. They also have some standards, like CustomerName vs. CustomerNames for various data items. In fact, they have enough that they built a tool to scan their database code to ensure that changes to the QA and UAT environments adhere to these modeling standards.

    I wonder how many organizations have formal standards. While I’ve often tried to set some naming guidelines, I often haven’t seen anything (or created anything) formal enough to build a tool around. I would like to, and I think it’s a good idea, but it’s often something that isn’t handled in advance.

    One thing I do think is important is to use singular naming. It’s strange to me, as I’ve often thought of a table as a collection of Customers or Orders, but I get why singular makes more sense. I really started to embrace this more after a great design talk at one of the Denver Dev Days.

    In the talk, the speaker talked about naming a table as an entity, but then including the entity name in columns. For something like a Customer table, we might have CustomerID, CustomerFirstName, CustomerLastName, CustomerStatus, CustomerPreferredContact, etc. There could be FKs in here, such as ContactID or AddressID, that linked to the entries in those tables, but in general, using a name like this was fairly unique for each column, and it helped anyone know where the data resided.

    It was a lot of typing, and if you didn’t have a tool like SQL Prompt, that might be really annoying, but I found myself seeing this as a very logical and easy-to-understand structure that even inexperienced developers might be able to follow and mimic. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a need to understand how we want to model structures like names, addresses, and more, but it did seem better than having FirstName in some fields and fname in others. CustomerFirstName or EmployeeFirstName makes a lot of sense. It also prevents ambiguous columns in queries.

    I do think that good data modeling standards are helpful in organizations, especially as we allow more and more people to make database changes and our teams grow larger. I would like to know how many of you reading this feel. Do you think strong data modeling standards are a good idea?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Ten Database Commandments

    I love the Notorious B.I.G. His music isn’t for everyone, but I enjoy it. This piece takes one of his songs (NSFW – Ten Crack Commandments) and applies the list to databases. Each item from the song is listed, along with the way it might be changed for database work. The list is from Ottertune, which is a service designed to help you optimize your use of AWS RDS and Aurora databases, with AI. If you believe their hype, their service will get better performance and lower costs for you.

    In any case, with regard to databases, I suspect that the author is having some fun with the rules, and a few of them made me smile. They are cloud-related, but a few will apply to any environment.

    The first one is about budgets, noting you should not disclose your budget, which is in general a good rule whenever you are buying something. Don’t disclose information, and someone working for a vendor of tools, I think that most budget conversations aren’t something technical people should worry about. Decide what value you get from some tool/service/process/etc. and if there are time savings. Then let someone else decide if the ROI is worth the cost.

    Rule 2 is a stretch, but I do think that looking at new tools can be helpful. The caveat here is that many people, don’t often learn enough about existing tools to understand if they will solve issues. There are a lot of things you can do with many tools, so don’t just look for some magical new tool. Learn to use your tools well, and if you want to try a new one, keep in mind you will need to invest some time both learning about it and practicing some skills before you really know if it’s helpful. The other thing to remember is every new tool increases the bar for new staff. Try to limit the number of tools you use to those you need.

    Security is important and rule 3 is remembering not to give out more permissions than needed, especially to developers. I love this quote: “You don’t want randos at your organization logging in and running queries that they found on Stack Overflow.”

    A number of the other rules have to do with performance, which is certainly Ottertune’s business, but these are good basic practices that I see organizations not following. Too often management wants to save money and technical people make decisions that compromise performance. Lots of people overload systems, and then they can’t handle the workload well. I get that many CFOs and others want to see high CPU usage, which means they’re using the resources they pay for, but databases can be very bursty with resource usage. At the same time, you don’t want to over-provision resources because you are scared. Learn to find a balance that doesn’t waste money, but handles your workload well.

    Perhaps one of the best things about the cloud is that if we do make bad decisions, we can often provision more resources. It can take time to move to a new tier of service, so don’t expect instance response up or down, but if you need to double the CPUs for month-end processing, you can likely plan for the time to scale up your database instance and then scale down again when all the work is complete.

    It’s a fun article, and if you’re looking for some fun Notorious B.I.G.-related database content, grab a cup of coffee when you need a break and a smile.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Republish: Singular or Plural

    I still in Seattle attending the PASS Data Community Summit 2023. I decided to republish Singular or Plural today as my thinking has changed on these items. This isn’t worth a long debate. Get everyone in the room and let 2-4 people get 5 minutes to make a case, take a vote, and move on.

    I need to write an editorial on that.

  • Republish: Can Data Save the World

    I still in Seattle attending the PASS Data Community Summit 2023. I decided to republish Can Data Save the World? because I do think data is important for improving all aspects of the world. It’s not all we need, but it does matter. The more we measure and learn, the better decisions we can potentially make.