Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Improving Skills at Work

    A large part of the success I’ve had in my career has come from growing my skills, both technical and soft, throughout the years. I’ve always been driven to learn more and improve my ability to accomplish the tasks I’ve been assigned. Or those that I’ve sought out and tackled. A little initiative has been valuable in many successful reviews in the past.

    There is a shortage of skilled IT workers. There are numerous job openings that I see in many companies, at least outside of some of the large tech firms. Many of those have been laying off workers, especially in some of their divisions that haven’t been as successful as expected during the last few years.

    At the same time, a lot of companies are becoming more discriminating about who they hire. They don’t just need bodies, they need skilled bodies that can do the work they are struggling with, often in the DevOps, cloud, and data analysis areas.

    While a lot of you reading this newsletter will have data skills, are they the ones companies need? Do you understand Git, DevOps, builds, and pipelines? Are you familiar with cloud technologies and gluing systems together remotely? Can you handle python, Spark, Power BI, or business requests to do something with AI/ML?

    I’m often not surprised that many senior data people don’t have exposure to these technologies and aren’t sure how to gain skills. I am surprised that more employers aren’t upskilling existing people or reskilling them in new areas. It seems far too many companies don’t invest in their people, even in today’s world where hiring is both very expensive and time-consuming. It’s also frustrating when you can’t find qualified candidates.

    There’s a good article on upskilling and reskilling and the importance of having a plan inside your organization. This goes hand in hand with a number of presentations from companies at the various DOES conferences over the years. The successful companies that embrace a digital transformation (whatever that means), DevOps, and the Cloud have ways to bring their current employees along. They invest in their people, requiring them to grow, but assisting them on the journey.

    Not everyone wants to move to the cloud or DevOps or AI/ML. That’s fine, but my view is you have to embrace some change in your career if you want to create new opportunities for yourself and have choices in your future roles.

    If your company doesn’t do enough to help you grow into new roles with new skills, maybe send them this article. Make a business case that you can do more with some help, and you’re willing to invest some effort yourself to grow. Managers know hiring is hard, and if you’ve been a good employee, I think they often are willing to invest in you.

    If they’re not, then many you ought to think about that a bit and find out what you can do better so that they will invest in you. Not everyone makes it through corporate transformations, but many do if they are flexible and put in some effort.

    Steve Jones

  • Are You Still Using Portable Drives?

    It’s the holiday season and that means lots of promotions for various items to give as gifts. Black Friday took place recently and I had no shortage of advertisements that I saw for all sorts of things. From computers to televisions to headphones to any sort of tech gadget you can think of. Plenty of other types of gifts as well.

    One item that kept cropping up for me was SSD drives. I saw an article in Tom’s Hardware about prices crashing to all time lows. That dovetailed with my part of the Data Community Summit keynote where I remembered Jim Gray saying 1TB would soon be US$10,000 in 1999 at the first PASS conference. I looked back at a few orders I’d made and saw I paid $150 for 512GB in 2017 and $125 for 1TB in 2020. Now I could get quality portable, SATA, or even NVMe drives for under $100/1TB. Incredible.

    I thought about this recently as I packed for a trip. I used to carry 2 1TB drives in my bag, along with a couple of thumb drives. At a recent event, I realized I only had 1 thumb drive in my bag, which I hadn’t used for years. Packing for the next trip, I realized that my portable drives had been pulled out sometime during the pandemic and never returned. Despite almost 10 work trips in 2021 and almost 20 in 2022, I haven’t needed a plug in a drive.

    In fact, I’m not sure the last time I used a drive with a wire. I’m used to getting everything through a network, even if it’s not a fast one. I wonder how many of you just live only on networks and never worry about using physical storage to transfer data. It seems that the idea of not really needing to use some physical medium to transfer information is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

    I know there are still uses for physical drives. The Azure Data Box and AWS Snowball are used when large transfers will overwhelm a network. There are likely still some people who flip tape drives or mount and dismount disks as more storage is needed, but that seems to be a specialist role rather than something that many of us worry about. Especially with the cloud, it’s more likely that many of us may never need to touch physical storage again in our lives.

    I don’t know if this is a good thing for the world, but I do think it is convenient. Knowing there is almost always a network around, and that we can make transfers between devices with wi-fi or Bluetooth without needing a physical cable is somewhat amazing. It’s a far cry from using multiple floppy disks or CDs to move data around. In fact, I had to search around for an optical drive as I realized I still have backups of pictures on DVD and none of the last few machines I’ve owned have a DVD drive.

    The changing nature of storage still amazes me, someone that first dealt with tape storage as the medium for saving work. The world has come a long way, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Upgrading SQL Server Central

    The decision to upgrade database servers can be a complicated one that involves features, costs, and support requirements. While I think many people would love to run database systems for ten years, often there are concerns about support, which effectively ends after five years for SQL Server. While you can purchase extended support, is that worth the cost? A hard question to answer, but one I’ve had to confront lately. When do you upgrade a database instance?

    I’ve discussed this with a few customers, but it also came up in the context of SQL Server Central. We run a SQL Server 2016 database on Windows Server 2016. Someone recently sent a note that since 2016 is out of support, they’d like to upgrade the systems. They were thinking SQL Server 2019 on Windows Server 2022, but with the release of SQL Server 2022 that doesn’t make sense.

    I want to defer this process as long as possible. To me that means always aiming for the latest and greatest version. SQL Server releases roughly every 2-3 years, so this is the best time to upgrade for us. If we can upgrade before 12 months, we get 4+ years before we revisit this topic. If we were to upgrade to SQL Server 2019, then we’re already down to 2 years of support before we need to consider the topic again.

    I think many DBAs would feel the same way, looking to test and certify SQL Server 2022 for their internal apps. This is one reason why getting the RC0 and RC1 releases of new versions for some initial testing make sense. The sooner you can upgrade in version’s lifecycle, the longer before you do it again. Of course, if you have more than 50 servers, you might just be upgrading every year anyway, as some system is always falling out of support.

    Upgrades take time. There’s the time considering the decision, the testing a new system, the actual upgrade time, whether in place or migration, all of which eat up labor and time. Doing this for more than a few servers can become a full time job in some cases. That makes me start to really see the wisdom of using a PaaS service that’s evergreen.

    For organizations where support matters, then upgrades are a fact of life and a regular occurrence. However, if formal support isn’t an issue, you might feel differently. The more mainstream you keep your feature usage, the more likely that you can go far past 5, or even 10 years, with your database system. I know there are still companies running 2008, 2005, and even a few 2000 servers. I don’t know that the SQL Server Central code would run on SQL Server 2000, but it might. Project Nami is using fairly generic SQL. If we were more concerned about database licensing, likely we’d have not upgraded the site from ASP.NET to WordPress.

    For now, I think we’ll likely upgrade sometime in early 2023. I am not worried if things are delayed, but I do know that we also want to upgrade both WordPress and PHP. There is an order to getting all these steps completed with OS and database upgrades. Because of this, I want to ensure that we proceed soon and get things moving while my schedule is fairly light so that I can test and deal with any issues that arise. Hopefully there won’t be any, but I’ve learned to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, especially with software upgrades.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The Time Thieves

    Time is the most valuable asset I have most days. Time is often a limiting factor that dictates my priorities at work. It also often determines my stress and enjoyment levels in life. Using time effectively can lower the former and increase the latter.

    A few years ago I read Making Work Visible, which talks about work flow and how time can be wasted in teams. The book covers the 5 types of time thieves, and it helped me to better think about how I organize both my tasks at work and in my personal life. I think that has sometimes helped me find a way to get more done with less effort, and less stress.

    There’s an article from the author that summarizes the time thieves, talking about how to avoid losing time in a busy world. For me, I find that the WIP thief and the Unplanned Work are often the biggest thieves in my life. Usually when I haven’t done a good job of prioritizing and pushing back on low-priority items. Often, however, the person I’m pushing back on is me, so I’ve got to learn how to better manage myself.

    Often the way to avoid many of these issues at work is with better visibility and communication. These are two things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit after the recent PASS Data Community Summit. While I didn’t have much to do with the event, I did speak, and I took on some extra speaking duties when others were overloaded. I could certainly see some time thieves at work in the run-up to the event during the last few weeks. Things to try and fix before next year.

    We all need good technical skills, often strong ones when our organizations are trying to build, manage, and operate complex environments. However, there are other skills that can be just as important. Working in a team, coordinating work, being clear, and being transparent are all skills that can help us succeed without burnout. They are also key to finding these five time thieves and ensuring we get more done without requiring more resources.

    I still don’t quite know how to manage my work and personal lives together, but I am working on getting better at working in a group, which is something I find myself doing more and more.

    Steve Jones

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