Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?

    I was chatting with someone recently that’s younger than me. They’ve got a good job and had some success learning, but they felt like their career wasn’t progressing fast enough. This person still wanted to grow their career and their income. That’s the place many people find themselves.

    This individual was asking my advice since they thought I’d had some success and were looking for me to share some of the things that worked for me. I asked them this question: What have you done lately outside of work for your career?

    They hadn’t done really anything, which is fine. This person has a partner, hobbies, and has found some balance in life. They were enjoying themselves, which is great. I love people having balance in life.

    However.

    If you want to move faster in your career than others, you have to do more. I don’t mean work 90 hours a week or spend every night on a project. However, I grew my career with work outside of work. Brent Ozar did the same thing. Many of the speakers you see at conferences and Microsoft MVPs did the same thing. They put in extra hours to grow their skills and knowledge.

    I know lots of you work a lot, and you have family/friend/spiritual commitments. I get that. However, I’m sure most of you aren’t working the coal miner’s schedule. If you have hobbies or fun time, that’s great, but can you carve out some time from those to invest in your career? Brent has time management skills advice, and I’ve written about this as well. Doctors, lawyers, even auto mechanics work on their skills when they aren’t getting paid by someone. They do this as an investment in the future.

    As I move towards the end of my career, I do less (especially this year), but I still read some books that help grow my skills in areas Redgate cares about. I do some training for coaching to improve there. I do less for my career than I used to, but I still do something outside of work.

    Answer my question today. What have you done lately outside of work for your career?

    Steve Jones

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

  • How Wrong is Stack Overflow?

    I chose the title slightly to poke at Stack Overflow (SO), but the same take expressed in this tweet could be said about SQL Server Central. It’s not quite the same as anyone can answer questions on SQL Server Central.

    The tweet is a (long) hot take from Jerry Nixon, a C# developer and MS evangelist in Denver. Essentially he says that a lot of the SO answers are wrong, especially as the software and languages change. Old answers are upvoted, and remain at the top of the list, even as newer answers might be better. People don’t like the behavior on SO of moderators and people who post, which is something we’ve tried to avoid or limit here at SQL Server Central. We want there to be professional discussions. SO also doesn’t allow much discussion or nuance in the questions or answers.

    This isn’t just a SO problem or am SSC one. It’s a problem when we have lots of documentation, blogs, etc. on the Internet that search engines find and surface when it’s popular. Across time, these popular outdated posts remain, just like older documentation that doesn’t apply to a current version and this can be frustrating. I am even starting to get annoyed by the MS Learn docs for SQL Server as some functionality change across versions. It isn’t easy to determine what applies to which version, especially when subtle changes are made in how things work. If something is new, usually that’s clear, but when things change, it isn’t. The examples aren’t well maintained, or there are too many of them to really understand how and why a change in versions can affect your code.

    I do wonder if we ought to somehow limit content that we see by default to more recent content. Or maybe Google/Bing/et al ought to let us set that as a preference. In general, I want more recent content, but at the same time, I don’t want to say “give me blogs about something from the last month only.” It’s possible I use something that’s rare and the most recent blog is 7 months old.

    More, I wish we had better ways to tag content online as relevant for certain things or not. I can’t think about the entire world and all the different types of content, but I can think about technology and software. I’d like to know if someone write a highly popular and useful post on PowerShell 5 that was written and tested on that version. I can understand that it’s not necessarily tested on PoSh 7, though it could work. It could even be the best solution. The same thing applies to Python 3.8 or T-SQL for SQL 2016 or any other software.

    The challenge of keeping things up to date is a big one, especially as more companies move to release software more often. I’m always pointing out issues in the RG docs. Since we release every week or two, each product team has a busy job in ensuring documents are up to date, which is easy for the reference pages. This is a bit harder when there are articles were we explain how to use a feature or we have a walkthrough of the software. I don’t know if AI will help here, but I do think this is a place where AI might be able to help vendors at least keep up with changes. When code changes, update docs, all the docs including examples.

    I do also think dating content is important. Microsoft tried to stop doing this with some things and many people complained. Content needs a date. It might still be valid or useful, but without a date, we have no idea of the context in which it was produced. That might help us decide if it’s still relevant, useful, or if we need to continue searching further.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Archive to the Lake

    Microsoft Fabric was announced at Build in May 2023. This is the next evolution of data warehousing from Microsoft, folding in Synapse and a number of other technologies to create a simpler location for storing and analyzing data. We’ve published some articles on the platform and there’s a great presentation from Mr. Paul Andrew on Linked In. It’s worth listening to, even in the background. Paul has a nice style and a great voice.

    Part of this platform is OneLake. This is a data lake for your org, just one of them, and while it’s able to store data in many formats, it’s mainly optimized to read tabular data in the delta parquet format. This is essentially a compressed text file that allows for some transactional changes to the original data in parquet format.

    I don’t do a lot of work with text files, and I’ve been suspicious of using lots of CSV or other text files in a warehouse environment, which is what a lot of people were advocating a few years ago. Exporting tables into lots of files split on some field, like date, while easy, didn’t seem like the best way to move data for reporting.

    Fabric, however, is optimized for reading delta files. A few presentations I’ve seen from people have advocated for exporting your data from SQL Server (or other platforms) into parquet. While I don’t know there’s a native way to do this (yet), I suspect one is coming. I’ve seen lots of articles (one, two, three, more) about how to do this now. We also have SQL Server able to read these files with external file formats already, so I’m sure we’ll have an easy way to write them soon.

    Many of us struggle with large systems, especially with query performance. We’d love to archive off data, though that’s often impractical. However, in an amazing, wonderful world, maybe we’ll get lots of people doing this, writing about it in the media, and our bosses will start to let us establish an archive in the lake. We could move some data there, especially old, unchanging data. We could delete that from source systems. We could have all our users happy.

    I don’t know if I see lots of data moving to the lake, but I certainly expect lots of it to be copied. If you haven’t thought about archives, data lakes, and text formats, it’s an area that seems to have a lot of growth. Perhaps it’s of interest to you and you might find a new career.

    Or maybe you just hope it gets widely adopted to relieve some pressure on your OLTP server.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Flexible Work Policies are Preferred

    The great post-pandemic, post-Great-Resignation, hybrid/remote/in-the-office work debate continues. It seems almost every week I see more stories that report on, hype, attempt to prove, or otherwise stoke emotions about whether the future of work for many people is more likely in any of these three situations. One company mandates everyone back in the office, another goes completely remote, and it seems many can’t decide and have some sort of hybrid approach.

    Your boss might have strong opinions on one of these situations, which may or may not align with your organization. I see CEOs wanting one thing and individual managers sometimes wanting another. As much as I like remote working, and I’ve been based out of my home for over two decades, I also like seeing people and I am regularly traveling to the various Redgate offices (along with Grant and Ryan).

    If you want to try and sway your boss to let you work more flexibly, which is likely remote or hybrid, perhaps this article will help. There’s research from at least one company showing that having a flexible policy has helped a number of companies hire faster in 2023. While this isn’t in any particular geography, industry, or role, it does show that finding employees seems to be faster with flexible policies. That makes sense as the more remote you are, the more people in your pool of potential candidates.

    Of course, this doesn’t say if these people stick around, or if they’re qualified. Certainly many of us in the tech industry see plenty of candidates (or even coworkers) that don’t seem qualified for many, or any, roles. Hiring faster isn’t always good if there aren’t good candidates, but having more choices of who to hire does give you an edge in finding qualified candidates.

    It also gives you more work to do in separating those you’d consider hiring from those you wouldn’t. The flip side as well is that if you are flexible, then perhaps you can convince some already employed, talented workers to come to your organization.

    To be fair, many of us with these options are very lucky. There are lots of jobs where this isn’t a debate and people must show up to work every day. Cooks, taxi drivers, retail workers, and many, many more. This is a luxury issue, but it is still an issue. My view is that lots of knowledge work can be done remotely. However, I also think that teams gain something when they bond and get to know each other in person. Day-to-day work is great remote, but brainstorming and creativity work better sometimes when people are in the same room. Not always, but there are times it is better.

    So let your boss know that they might be able to better fill their open positions if they’re flexible. Maybe you’ll convince them to be more flexible with you as well.

    Steve Jones

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