Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Republish: Gigging for a Career

    I am in Seattle today attending the PASS Data Community Summit 2023, so you get Gigging for a Career as a republish.

  • No Degree Needed

    For most of my career, I’ve seen many companies that hire white-collar workers, including their IT staff, require a college degree or the equivalent experience in the military. Often this has been something the Human Resources department has made a requirement in their job descriptions and requests to recruiters. This was a filter that stopped many talented people from even getting an interview.

    That hasn’t stopped a lot of people from pursuing careers as developers or IT staffers, and I’ve had many friends who have had successful careers without a degree.

    The world has been changing, especially since the pandemic, and many companies are no longer requiring any sort of university degree for candidates. There are still a lot of job descriptions that “prefer” a degree, but even that is changing rapidly. I hope at some point that we stop looking at degrees as anything other than a bit of experience in working through a project and not as any sort of qualification for a particular job.

    This week there was an article about seven ways to become a software engineer without a degree. The ways are: learn to program, earn a cert, contribute to an OSS codebase, write documentation, find employers who don’t care, be a freelance developer, and go to a bootcamp. Of these, a few seem redundant learning to code is probably needed to contribute to OSS or freelancing.

    Of these, I overall like the advice. Being self-motivated or driven is a skill that many employers appreciate. Showing that you are producing something useful in the world is a good way to create opportunities. It’s also a sign that you’ll work to be productive and not expect to avoid work after getting hired. I know I prefer people who go figure things out rather than those who wait for someone else to tell them what to do. I don’t recommend bootcamps, however, unless you are very motivated to take whatever you learn and then expand on it with OSS contributions or other tasks that showcase and expand knowledge.

    Finding a job is challenging at times, and certainly impressing someone enough to hire you is a task. A degree can help, especially with those who might be prejudiced towards university experience, but more and more people recognize that college doesn’t necessarily prepare you to be productive or a great employee. You can prove that to people yourself with some work, some documenting your efforts, and some good soft skills to explain what you know.

    Steve Jones

  • 30 Years of SQL Server on Windows

    I’ve spent over 30 years working with SQL Server. I saw a post recently from Bob Ward who is celebrating 30 years at Microsoft, noting this is also the 30th anniversary of SQL Server on Windows. It’s been an honor for me to get to know Bob, learn from him, and spend time socially at various events around the world. He’s truly been a force in improving the SQL Server platform through the years.

    While SQL Server has been on Windows for 30 years, I’ve got a bit more than 30 years working with the platform as I actually started managing a SQL Server instance on OS/2. With the addition of Linux, I’ve now run SQL Server on three different server OS hosts: OS/2, Windows, and Linux. That’s somewhat amazing to me, especially as one of my April Fools jokes came true. This was one of the most-read articles on SQL Server Central for a long time, and perhaps it influenced enough people at Microsoft to build and release a Linux version.

    Over three decades, the growth of the platform has been amazing. We’ve had the core engine lose tables in memory and then get them back with In-Memory objects. We have seen the heavyweight trace evolve into Extended Events and SQL Audit. The language has grown with many new ANSI features that help us write better code. We’ve deprecated a number of objects and added the ability to create our own with the CLR. We’ve added new data types, not all of which are named well, but we still have the ability to process more types of data natively. We’ve even added new services, with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS packaged into the platform.

    Not a lot has been removed, but a few things are gone, like Notification Services. Replication doesn’t seem to have changed a lot in 30 years, which is a bit disappointing to me, but there have been a lot of improvements in HADR capabilities. We even have other companies (Amazon and Google) selling their own version of SQL Server as a platform, where you don’t have to manage the instance.

    In many ways, I’ve found SQL Server to be easier to use, but also much harder to learn about because the breadth of what’s in the product is so wide now. I can’t imagine anyone actually knows the entire product at a very deep level. I’ve also found myself more disappointed with the experiments Microsoft makes when adding features and not continuing to invest and evolve them (or even fix all the bugs).

    There certainly have been plenty of bugs, security issues, and maddening moments in working with SQL Server, but it’s been a great 30 years of a career working on the Windows version. I likely won’t do that for another 30 years, but I hope those of you making a living working with the platform enjoy it as much as I do.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Does Management Care About the Database?

    Many of the services that businesses use are taken for granted. In an office, management expects electricity, water, and heat just work. If they don’t, then often a crisis is declared and funds are spent to rectify the situation. I’ve been in businesses where any of those systems fail and usually, it’s very disruptive. I think these days a computer network is often seen as the same type of utility service where we take it for granted, but if it doesn’t work, it’s a crisis.

    Is the database seen as a service or is it more important than that? I think many software applications are different, and often seen as critical to business success, but I sometimes see both developers and management treating the database as a utility service. They just expect it to work, view it as a filing cabinet, and want to ignore it whenever possible.

    I think this is one reason that developers are often searching out new platforms, either cloud or NoSQL, because they want to keep the storage aspect of data simple and not spend time or effort managing data. Or they want to experiment with something they think is easier to use. Many developers like the idea of a schema-on-read, and sometimes use that to argue against another relational database and instead choose another platform.

    I think this is short-sighted, however, as the app now has the technical debt of supporting multiple schemas, and many of the databases using this format then suffer from one of two constraints. Either they store duplicate data for performance reasons, essentially de-normalizing their data storage, or they require some sort of ETL to ensure the data can be queried for analytics. Often schema-on-read isn’t efficient when querying across documents/keys/nodes/etc.

    There might be good news for many of us database professionals as an article talks about the boardroom starting to think about the database. To be fair, this is a sponsored article from Redgate, but it is based on a lot of research and feedback from customers that show how management is starting to treat the database as a strategic asset and not a common utility. Many executives are starting to realize that their data is full of value if it can be analyzed, and that the performance of these systems is important. We both need well-designed databases and well-written code, and we need to ensure that database development keeps up with today’s application changes.

    More and more of the customers I work with are finding their executives see more value in ensuring the database gets the resources to ensure it performs well, including better training for developers and better processes. It’s good to see more and more companies embracing modern DevOps development in both application software and database software.

    Steve Jones

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