Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Using Technology for Health

    I’ve been fairly healthy and fit for most of my life. While I’ve always had a few extra pounds, I do try to eat better than average and I exercise regularly. That didn’t stop age and some pandemic laxity from catching up with me. My annual checkup last December had my doctor (and me) slightly concerned about a few things. I made a goal of exercise for January and better eating in 2022.

    I thought about how I’ve used technology to help me with this after reading Robert Cain’s post on his efforts to get more healthy. Robert is a friend and I enjoy seeing him at various events. I’m looking forward to our next meeting and seeing the changes in person.

    He uses an Apple Watch and his iPhone, as well as a few devices to measure and track different aspects of his health. He can review his progress towards goals and export data for his physician. The post provides some recommendations and explanations of how technology helps. I found it interesting, as well as a contrast to what I do.

    Technology is more of a substitute for my memory, giving me a view into how I work on my health and fitness with a light touch. I don’t track food, but I have been on a fairly limited diet, which means I have a rough idea of what I consume and the calories involved. I don’t track hydration, but I started to fill 4 water bottles, about 120oz, and empty them each day. I use my watch to log exercise and heart, but I mostly glance to see if I am working hard enough and if my long-term trend for heart rate changes. I do track my weight, but I step on a scale every day or two and record the value in an app.

    It’s common for people working at desks, especially in technology, to lead a less than healthy lifestyle. While I go to the gym often, my wife is probably healthier because she works outside and is active most every day. Technology can help some of us improve our health. The gamification and community aspects of technology apps definitely change how we may approach the challenge. Various devices also lower the effort of data entry.

    If you are looking to improve your health, or you struggle with making changes in diet or exercise, read Robert’s post and think about harnessing some of the power of tech devices to help you improve your life. If you do use some technology, write about it and maybe you’ll inspire others.

    As for my goals? From Jan 4 to Mar 2, I exercised on 48 different days. Not every day, but good enough for me. I have lost about 15 pounds and my long-term resting heart rate has dipped below 50bpm. Technology didn’t really make this happen, but it helped, and I am glad that I can easily see some incremental progress, which isn’t always apparent when I rely on my memory of what my stats were a month ago.

    Steve Jones

  • Is the Time of the DBA Ending?

    I ran across a piece on the fall of the DBA (or part of a piece), and wondered if this is the time when the DBA is disappearing. I do know that plenty of organizations never formally adopted the DBA as a position, and plenty more have abandoned it. Not that there aren’t people managing databases, but they have moved into Database Engineer, SRE, or plain old sysadmin. They might even have another job but function as an accidental DBA.

    The DBA role has often been a mix of many things. Certainly, this is a tactical, operations role that keeps systems running, dealing with performance, security, and availability. DBAs also fix quality issues in production, deploy code changes, and often advise developers on what works well and what doesn’t. They tend to be a bit of insurance against things going wrong as well as the scapegoat when anything does go wrong. I found the DBA role to be a constantly changing, never-ending grab-bag of challenges on a regular basis.

    Those tasks don’t go away with a title change, nor with a move to the cloud, the adoption of NoSQL data stores, or the move to a DevOps style of software development. They might get handled by another role or team, but they still need to be dealt with. The DBA might need to change titles or groups, and they might need to learn how to use automation, GitOps, or some other new protocol for handling the work. As the article linked above mentions, they may need to tackle work at a higher level, not the manual, click, click repetitive process they might have followed in the past. The trend is often to work smarter, not harder.

    As with any change, there will be people who succeed and do better in the future, as well as those that find their best days behind them. I find change often brings opportunities if I am open to them and make an effort to look for those opportunities. You might find your title changes and you can ask for more compensation or more interesting work as the role changes.

    Embrace change, learn something new and find a way to make change work to your advantage. There is always a way to make this happen.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The Test Mistake

    Last year a company was testing their software in a dev/test environment and accidentally sent out an “Integration email” to their customers.  They blamed this on an intern, though a little jokingly, and plenty of people shared their own stories about making mistakes.

    I did this once, and only once. I was doing some software testing on a copy of the production database and accidentally sent out thousands of emails to customers. I hadn’t scrubbed the email addresses in the copy, but since I also hadn’t scrubbed the data, customers got an “extra” email for their account and few complained. My boss, however, complained quite a bit and with good reason.

    These days using production data in dev/test environments isn’t really an acceptable practice. Plenty of organizations do it, and hopefully, they are taking precautions. Kendra Little wrote a little about what happened and what should be done, including scrubbing out sensitive data. Not enough people do this, though I am seeing more and more companies looking for solutions that prevent data release.

    This isn’t an intern’s issue. I appreciate someone making a bit of a joke here, and hopefully, there were engineers that taught the intern something. The bigger issue is that we make mistakes as humans and our protocols and processes should expect that. This is one reason why adopting automation in our software process is important. Whether that’s deploying code to the right production server or refreshing the non-production databases, we want to be sure that we limit the number of human mistakes.

    There are always places where we will use humans to perform a process. Whether that’s typing code or clicking something. It’s entirely possible someone clicks the wrong button or types the wrong item. As much as possible, we can use automation to provide a safety net to prevent these issues from reaching customers. We can’t prevent every mistake, but we can continue to improve our process but adjusting it over time. At the very least, we ought to prevent the same mistake from happening over and over.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Less is More

    The world of Information Technology has changed a lot during my career, but in some ways, many things remain the same. There are still mainframes in use, and plenty of jobs. Lots of companies maintain their infrastructure in data centers, even though some are turning to private clouds for their infrastructure. There are plenty of jobs in that area as well.

    There is a trend to consolidate resources into a bucket and then allocate those as needed for various applications and services. This is what mainframes do, albeit at a very high degree of reliability (and cost). The cloud seeks to replicate this, not with high reliability, but with redundancy, expecting systems to fail. In fact, plenty of the data centers these days involve a lot of similar hardware systems tied together with software, with failed systems being left in place rather than replaced.

    This trend aims towards a lights-out data center, where humans don’t work inside the location with servers. As someone that used to keep a coat by my desk in the summertime for trips inside the locked “computer room”, it’s a welcome trend. While a few people might actually need to check a cable or service an AC or UPS unit, most of us these days never see the systems we work on, whether those systems are owned by our company or rented in the cloud.

    This doesn’t mean that we won’t have as much work. In fact, I think that most of the trends in computing over the last three decades have opened up opportunities for workers. This article talks about some of those changes that allow workers to morph along with technology to tackle different aspects of similar jobs. I certainly expect that anyone who wants to improve their skills and adapt to the new data center of the future to have plenty of work.

    This reminds me of a scene from Aliens, where workers use enhanced suits to load heavy crates. I think this is the type of future I see, where humans work alongside new technology rather than being displaced by it. The need for humans to monitor, manage, adjust, and configure software systems and physically work alongside high-tech software is not going away anytime soon. The more that we adapt new technology, the more it seems that we add humans to work alongside it in some new way.

    Continue to learn, adapt, and adjust your skillset and you can remain employed for a long time.

    Steve Jones

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