In England today, working even though it’s a UK holiday. I was supposed to be out at a customer all day, so I had repeated an old editorial. Check out Are You a Traffic Cop and see if you feel differently than you did the first time you read it.
Category: Editorial
-
Paying It Forward on the Internet
A big part of SQL Server Central has been members of the community answering questions for others. We have an amazing community and over the years, it’s been helpful to so many people. I often get the thanks, but really the people at the top of the all-time list have been those that have helped many people. There are too many to list, but gilamonster, Jeff Moden, lynn-pettis, lowell, and more have been tremendous assets to our community.
Part of the inspiration for StackOverflow years ago was SQL Server Central and the popularity of people helping others. The main thing their founders didn’t like from us (and other sites) was the need to register. Hence, the ability to be anonymous on Stack if you choose. No matter what format or style of Q&A you like, Stack and many other sites have found that there is a lot of desire to ask and answer questions online.
Brent Ozar answers questions regularly during his office hours. I enjoy watching the recordings, especially from the beach. I miss the beach, but I love the mountains, so I’m only a bit jealous. However, recently he had a number of questions come through that he declined to answer and instead put out a post, inviting the community to answer. There are some interesting answers in there, and some are worth reading. Maybe you even want to add your own thoughts to some of the questions.
A big part of my career, and in life outside of my career, is helping others improve their lives. Answering questions for others got me started on this path of SQL Server Central and speaking at conferences. Coaching my kids led me to coach others. Thinking about both those things got me to volunteer at other organizations.
I’ve had success, so I’m paying it forward in different ways. I’d encourage you to do the same. Whether online or in your local community, whether now or at some point in the future, paying it forward is good for your soul.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
-
To Which Experts Should You Listen?
When I was getting my career going in Denver, Microsoft used to host lunch sessions every few weeks in their office. There were some Microsoft employees presenting and some community members. I learned a lot from both groups. At local user groups, more often than not, a community speaker was present, but there were plenty of people that worked for different vendor companies that delivered talks. I saw many of these people are knowledgeable in their area, and they taught me things I used in my job.
At some point, it started to seem that presenters that worked for companies weren’t experts, and maybe more importantly, they weren’t worth listening to because they were “selling something.” In fact, a large community conference, and some small ones, banned “vendor” talks and the use of tools in presentations. Sometimes even free ones, if someone was promoting the software as the focus in their talk.
That hasn’t applied to Microsoft, even when they are “selling” something, free or not.
I understand some of the concerns. I’ve seen some extremely poor presentations from sales and marketing staff, who often don’t really understand the technology or why it would be used in one situation over another. There is no shortage of complaints about the poor experience from the attendees who didn’t learn anything useful. That’s fair.
There was a post about this topic from a writer. While I think lots of larger technology conferences do end up with speakers that vendors sponsor, they have plenty of speakers aren’t sponsored, and not all sessions are sales pitches. The SQL community might be slightly different as we have lots of community speakers, more than I ever imagined we’d have. I love that so many people have chosen to get up in front of groups and share their knowledge.
Technical experts abound, and many of them work for vendors. In fact, often the people who give high-quality technical talks get hired by various vendors. I’m one of those, and it’s always a challenge to find a way to talk about a problem and potential solutions without selling a product. I must present well because I rarely get complaints, and I find there are a lot of other technical experts that do a great job as well. I hope that you give most people a chance and if they end up making a sales presentation, then let the organizers know. They can always address issues in the future.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
-
The Challenge of Early Tech Decisions
When we design software or databases, we have to make decisions right now. If you work in as many environments as I have, this means I’m often picking a tool, platform, version, technology, or something else without a complete set of information. In some cases, I’m actually writing code (SQL or C#/Java/etc.) without completely knowing the business problem I’m solving. I do know what someone described, but as many of us find out, those descriptions often prove to be lacking.
Over time, we refine the code with feedback from users, which is why DevOps has become so popular. We write the best code we can and then quickly alter code if we haven’t hit the mark. We constantly adjust by making small changes and improvements.
However, changing the code is one thing. Changing more fundamental technology choices is harder. There is an interesting post on the disproportionate impact of your early tech decisions from one of the developers at Stripe. One of the examples given is for the database platform, which was Mongo. The piece notes that once the database platform is chosen, most groups never switch platforms. I think that’s been true in many places I’ve worked. The same thing for languages and cloud providers as well, as once a choice is made, rarely does a team, much less an organization, switch.
Why is this? Is the cost of switching that high? I think it is. I’ve seen a few organizations want to migrate from a licensed relational platform to one that is free and OSS. However, the time it takes to rewrite code, the time to build new expertise, learn the tips and tricks for a new database (or other platform technology) is significant. A team can make no shortage of mistakes during this process. Is that worth the cost of licensing? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s a hard thing to decide. With the high cost of labor, I think it’s hard to make a good argument to rewrite.
In many cases, I’d argue that core changes to your technology stack ought to be considered, but understanding that no tech will solve all your problems and you will make lots of mistakes in the process of changing. Does this mean you need to make a great decision when you start working on a project? In my mind, no. Make the decision to use what your team is most familiar with and then live with it.
And be open to using targeted technology for specific needs. Lots of transient data in a busy workload? Add Redis to your database stack. If you need full-text search, consider ElasticSearch. Maybe add a graph database (not SQL Server) if you need queries in this problem domain. Use what works, and learn to use it well.
That last sentence might be the most important. Any technology can likely support most workloads, but you need to write good code and learn to use the platform well.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
