Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • My Incredible Journey With Your Help

    At Techorama, I saw a keynote from Derek Martin of Microsoft. The talk was called Pain, Grief, Perseverance, and Technology, and it’s worth seeing if you can find it live or recorded. David talks about his growth in life from a young man to a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, husband, and father of six or seven. All the while dealing with a mental illness and learning to ask for help and to manage his busy life.

    It’s a great talk, though one I only lightly relate to. My life has been mostly easy and wonderful. Not always, but mostly. My problems are often minor ones. As I write this, I had surgery this morning to repair a painful ankle I’ve been dealing with for a few years. Things went smoothly and I expect rehab to be the same.

    My challenge with this issue? Scheduling it when I had a hole in my schedule to get cut and then a follow up. As it is, I arrived home from Brussels yesterday with a little stress about the COVID test and airline delays in getting back. I now fly to Germany in 3 days and then come back next week to see the doctor. I know, life is hard for me. My wife “gets” to come along and help carry my bags on a trip to Europe.

    Did I mention my life is amazing?

    I’ve had a lot of success in my career. I’m not an expert on tuning like Grant or Erik. I don’t know all the ins and outs of Power BI like Patrick or the deep Azure tricks that Denny and Joey constantly amaze me with. I don’t make the great presentations that Brent does or the business success of Stacia or the impressive credentials of Dr. Holt. I’ve learned from all these people and more. They’ve been there to give me help, whether with a technical problem or guidance in some area of life.

    I work hard. I’ve worked many weeks in my career and at my career beyond the standard 40, or even the common tech 50. I grind away at times, but I’ve also learned to say no and find balance. My wife and Andy remind me that babies aren’t dying because I take time off and that I need to take time off. Tjay provides the inspiration to do that more. I’ve learned to do that more as I age, balancing a busy work schedule with my coaching hobby. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some wonderful young ladies the last six years and travel with them to various cities to watch them compete, laugh, cheer, cry, and work as hard as I’ve ever worked at my career. In a sense, I have two amazing careers.

    My kids are healthy and happy. I’m proud of their journeys through life as two of them work on careers and one grinds through university. They are strong and dependable. They find a better balance between work and life, but don’t shy away from work and are accountable and responsible. This week, they’re taking over the cooking for me and horse chores for my wife as we travel in Europe.

    Again, life is wonderful here.

    My Mom praises my work ethic in getting through college and finding jobs that grew my career because of my hard work, and the effort I made to build SQL Server Central with Andy and Brian and then sell it to Redgate. All true, but that’s not the whole story. I had luck in people giving me opportunities, supporting me, even helping with the workload at times. I had lots of opportunities, and I took advantage of them. I also had plenty of help.

    I helped build something that Redgate and many of you have appreciated and used over the years. SQL Server Central, SQL Saturday, the Networking Dinner at the Pass Summit, and a few other things. However, you all helped me with those things. Many of you took a chance on posting a question or coming to the event. Plenty others of you participated with answers, articles, presentations, volunteer efforts, and more. You have helped me in my journey and I appreciate your efforts alongside my own.

    We’ve been a team, and I thank you for being there alongside me.

    I’m on an amazing journey in life, and I’m trying to enjoy more of it even as I keep busy at living it. My “problems” are first world ones, minor bumps on one a road I could never have imagined traveling when I was younger. I work hard, but I know many of you are there to help me often. Sometimes you help me when I don’t ask or think I need assistance.

    You can find an amazing life for you. Work at life, work at your attitude, work at your balance, work at your skills, and work at asking for help. I, and many others, are also here to help you. We don’t achieve anything on our own, but we do work to find success. Remember there is always someone else willing to provide an assist when you need it. Sometimes we don’t even realize how others help us, but they do.

    My life is perfect, thanks to us.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Becoming a Better DBA

    One of the things that I try to advocate for is that more of you actively manage your careers and find ways to improve your skills. I want you to be more impressive and find an amazing job for you. Not my job, because I have the best job in the world, but I hope you find a job that you love as much as I love mine.

    It does take effort, work, and focus. It’s something else to manage in life. I certainly don’t want you to only care about work. After all, we work to live, not live to work.

    That being said, I think you can build the habit of regular career improvement. For those of you that work as DBAs, I found this list of things that help improve your productivity. The first few items are practical having a routine of things to check and a way to monitor your systems. Those are core skills and a base from which to build. I might stress backups, restores and DR as well, since the main thing is that you can protect and recover data if everything else falls apart.

    However, the last few items are less tangible. How do you keep up, explore, and try things? In what area or topic should you start? What’s important? I find many people struggle with these less directed pieces of advice. If I want to keep up, what do I do? If I want to experiment or ask about something, what is the most efficient way to do this?

    There’s advice in the article, but here’s my main thought. Don’t try to be efficient or perfect. Just pick the thing that’s in front of you. Pick something that someone asked you about and you didn’t know. Or maybe the thing that looked interesting? Just move forward.

    Most of the work we do to improve ourselves isn’t tightly focused at first. It’s just a step forward and it’s not a permanent step. If you decide to start learning about something such as Availability Groups and then realize you don’t like this area or it isn’t important, just switch to something else. Your time isn’t wasted because even if you don’t use that skill, you learned about learning something. And you learned something about yourself and what you enjoy. Move on and try something else.

    For me, I started SQL Server Central. but I liked newsletters similar to the one I send out each week because they gave me something to learn about. I used to troll forums at various places and see the “active threads“. I’d try to answer random questions, even if I didn’t post the answers. I started to blog and write, mostly to see if I could explain things back in a way that made sense. It became a career, but before that it was a way to impress hiring managers. It also forced me to learn more about little topics and all of that knowledge helped me to be more effective at my job.

    Taking a little time every week to learn something, work on your career, and document it (hopefully as a #SQLNewBlogger). It is a good way to improve your skills and also showcase them for the next person that hires (or promotes) you. Hopefully into a position that you desire and choose.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Flawed Data Integration

    I recently had to travel by airplane after a surgery. My mobility was limited and I requested wheelchair assistance, which I used from Denver to Houston to Amsterdam. Across three airports and two countries, the process was interesting, especially the data integration needed to get things to happen in the real world. As often is the case, there are all sorts of ways that systems don’t work well together.

    In this case, there are actually multiple digital systems integrated. Since airlines contract with passengers, they record their own data that a particular person needs something. However, the actual service is provided by the airport, and each airport has their own system. A classic case of data transfer being needed between multiple systems, in this case three different airport systems.

    Like the digital applications and databases many of us work with, there are disparate ways the data is handled in different systems. In Denver, the young man pushing me had to update his location constantly, so that there was tracking of how I moved through the airport from check-in to security to the train to the gate. I assume some notification gets to a person at the gate, but it was late. Without my wife, I wouldn’t necessarily have had a good way to flag down someone. I assume the delays I had at all gates were more human than digital, but I really don’t know. As a “customer” here, I have no idea when data moves from one application to another, much less when the humans in the real world get notified.

    Many of our digital transformations are taking place with the idea of bringing more transparency to various processes, either digital or analog. Our DevOps changes are to make it clearer how we build and deploy software. Many new app features are built to help employees better understand some part of their business. Others are there to inform customers and give them more reasons to stay our customers and not move on to a competitor.

    I think it’s important that our software developers and UX designers keep evolving and growing to better meet the needs of our customers. I think it’s amazing how well software has grown and changed from a one-size-fits-all to adapting and customizing for different users. We all might use and react to software a little differently, so allowing the software to meld with the way we work is incredibly helpful to reducing the friction and flaws in the human to computer integration.

    This was a good reminder to me of how important data integrations can be between systems, and how much of an impact those friction points can have on a customer. The trip back was much smoother, with people waiting at the airplane doors and showing up in time to get me onto the next plane. That was a wonderful reminder of just how data integration between applications can mesh with humans to create a incredible experience for the customer.

    Steve Jones

  • Are Cubes Dead?

    I was talking with a friend recently about technology. This individual is a person focused on business intelligence, originally a developer, but now an architect and consultant. They have a fair number of clients and have worked with them to build solutions to assist in analysis and decision-making for all sorts of organizations. This person has primarily worked in the Microsoft stack but has embraced NoSQL, Hadoop, and other technologies. In many ways they view the world as I do, using what works well for a particular situation without prejudice. They want to be effective, using whatever technology may be best in the current situation.

    In their career, this person has extensive SQL Server Analysis Services experience and has built many cubes over the years that clients access with any number of front-end tools. I would guess that cube design and construction have made this person a lot of money over the years.

    As we talked, I wasn’t surprised to hear my friend say they thought cubes were dead. It was an approach to analysis that they wouldn’t recommend anymore. That is something I’ve felt for some time. As data volumes grow and competition increases, there is a need for more real-time analysis. The processing time for cubes doesn’t make sense.

    Hardware advances, query technologies against files in data lakes, and automatic ingestion of large volumes of data into columnar formats have reduced the need for data mart cubes. I see less and less content produced in this area, both by vendors and individuals working with technology. ETL has given way to ELT, and data lakes seem to be far more useful than data marts that pre-aggregate data in predefined ways.

    Most of you reading this work in the OLTP space, but there are plenty of you that built BI solutions or interact with those that need them. In the modern, 2020s era, do you find people still building new cubes and taking advantage of ROLAP/MOLAP/HOLAP systems? Or is this now legacy tech you can’t wait to remove from your infrastructure? I think BI is more important than ever, but cubes are dead.

    Steve Jones

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