Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 2022

    This weekend is Christmas, and likely many of you are not working hard today and will enjoy a long weekend until Tuesday. There are many other holidays at this time of year as well, and I hope you are enjoying the season with loved ones. I want to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season.

    As we come to the end of this year, it’s a good time to take stock of life. Work slows down for many of us, and it’s a time we think about family and friends. My wish is that you find yourself in a better position than last year. You are hopefully finding ways to cope and enjoy this world.

    If not, then take stock of what isn’t working well and make a plan to change things. Life is short, sometimes much shorter than we realize, so move towards something that fulfills you, brings you happiness, and lets you enjoy the most of each day.

    Enjoy the weekend and I’ll see you next week.

    Steve Jones

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

  • CPU Upgrades

    I expected this to be an article from Glenn Berry. He often tries to convince me to upgrade. I think so he can justify buying his own new hardware.

    In this case, however, this is a note from Tom’s Hardware that it’s a great time to upgrade your CPU. The article is a few weeks old, referencing Cyber Monday deals, and it notes that CPU sales are at a 30-year low. This means there’s a lot of supply and retailers are trying to clear out stock.

    I don’t know how many of you find your CPU slow, or if you have access to change the CPU (often you can’t in a laptop). If you have a desktop, then you might not have a motherboard that supports the latest CPUs. Glenn would say upgrade your motherboard, but as I’ve seen in the past, this sometimes means memory upgrades as well.

    Many of us work with server machines, but we aren’t responsible for the hardware. We often can’t even request different hardware. Glenn has written about which CPUs work for SQL Server, though not for a few years. Maybe this piece will get him to update that article.

    SQL Server 2022 is the latest version, and the price as increased. The performance per core is more important than ever, so choosing the best CPU could have a big impact on the ROI of your database server. Even if you use the cloud, often there are choices in hardware, and expressing your reasoning for one over the other to the groups responsible for infrastructure can help ensure your organization gets the most performance for their billing.

    And if you’re the person specifying hardware, you definitely ought to understand the differences between the CPU choices and make the best choice for your budget.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The SPU

    Ever since I heard about the SQLOS and all the work that went into producing an operating system for SQL Server inside of the host OS, I’ve thought that perhaps there might be value in specializing the environment for a database platform. Given the importance of databases, especially relational ones, and the need to get every bit of performance out of hardware, I wondered if we wouldn’t see a version of SQL Server that is installed directly on the hardware, without a host OS.

    In some sense, I guess that’s what a PaaS database is in Azure, but I thought we might see that for the download-and-install version. I doubt that will ever happen now with the growth of the cloud.

    Instead, maybe there’s a better way to improve performance without requiring SQL Server (or Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) to implement some of the OS features they’d need. Perhaps we could change the hardware around and use a SQL Processing Unit (SPU). The SPU is another specialized chip. Like a GPU for graphics, or even some of the other chips that are made specifically for mobiles, storage, or networking, this one would be focused on database needs. Apparently, there are a few companies that are researching how they might build chips that focus specifically on the types of computations that data analysis requires.

    I don’t know how practical this is, or whether we’d see any major database vendor attempt to port to a new chip. Perhaps they’d add instructions that could use one of these chips inside a regular system, similar to how a GPU can offload work. That might seriously improve performance, something that a lot of our customers would appreciate. Especially if this happens without spending a lot of developer time rewriting old code.

    That’s not to say that developers shouldn’t learn to write better code. They ought to, mostly so that their initial attempt at producing reports or batches of data handles a wide variety of data values and workloads without stressing the hardware. More efficient code is always the best way to attack any problem. Even if you had a very efficient SPU, chances are that your workload will still grow to overwhelm the hardware at some point, especially as the number of users grows.

    Monitoring helps find problem queries, but it’s up to developers to change their habits, grow their knowledge, and produce better code sooner. Then we can use hardware to deal with the large numbers of users that need to access the system.

    Steve Jones

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

  • 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