Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • 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.

  • Republish: The Nightmare Letter

    I’m still at DataGrillen today, enjoying German food, fun, and learning a little data stuff.

    You get The Nightmare Letter that I thought might be more of a problem. I don’t think this is as wide a problem as many speculated, but it does happen. I know I get regular data removal requests at SQL Saturday.