Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Essential Operations

    It would seem obvious, but IT Operations staff are often essential to ensuring that systems and business can keep running. From websites to email to VPNs, many of the companies in which I’ve worked don’t have systems that will run without someone keeping an eye on them. Sometimes many eyes on a daily basis if we want to ensure that clients can log into applications and use them.

    The pandemic of the last year has shown many organizations that workers can get their jobs done from any location. Very few of us actually touch the physical hardware that we might manage, but we do need access to those systems across networks, in a secure way. That might not have been as big a challenge as getting the rest of a company online, but it was a lot of work.

    I don’t know how many people prioritize or consider IT operations an essential worker. This article makes a case that anyone working in IT Ops ought to be classified in the same way that health-case workers, teachers, and more. These workers were needed to keep the world moving forward, so why not recognize the importance of IT Ops along with these other types of workers.

    I do agree that Operations staff need to be treated as important pieces in an organization. Even if you use a lot of DevOps automation, GitOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, and cloud resources, you need staff to track, configure, manage, monitor, and adjust the way things work. There likely isn’t any organization that has an infrastructure they can run without any humans involved on a weekly basis. Likely something would break in that time and you need some staff.

    While you might consider the operations staff to be more replaceable and less valuable than developers or others, keep in mind that bringing someone up to speed on existing systems and ensuring they can run without service interruption isn’t as simple as just grabbing a new worker from some temp agency.

    If you use computer services from your company, remember that someone is ensuring they continue to run smoothly for you, even if you don’t realize what they are doing. Remember there is someone that is behind the scenes, often during nights and weekends, patching, upgrading, and monitoring equipment. Thank them, send some appreciation, and acknowledge their effort the next time you have the opportunity. I’ve done that job, and I know it can be thankless. I’m going to take a moment and drop a note to my own staff, who really make my life much easier.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Finding Legal Data

    Many of us have likely been asked about data science or machine learning in the last few years by someone in our organization. This has become a hot field, with many companies looking to try and find ways to use the technology to improve their work in some way. While I don’t know how successful these projects have been in organizations, I know that some areas seem to be finding practical applications. Image recognition, translation, and even some application scoring systems have benefited from machine learning algorithms.

    To build a successful model that works well, we need training data. Often lots of training data, and then have some metadata about how our training data might be applicable to a particular question. For example, if we have lots of pictures of dogs, we might need to tag the different breeds in order for a system to differentiate among them. If we want loan applications scored, we should have a corpus of documents that are already scored. This metadata allows the system to learn.

    There is a company, Clearview AI, that markets itself as a facial recognition system. To build their model, they scraped images from YouTube and other Internet sources, without consent from Google or the subjects of the videos. This is interesting, as the data itself is publicly available, but gathering it into a database and using it for other purposes might run afoul of data privacy laws, like the GDPR.

    I don’t quite know how to feel about this use of public data. While I don’t mind people viewing my pictures, I’m not sure that I like the idea of them being copied into a database for some other purpose. That might seem silly, or even strange, but I do think there is power in data and more power in more data. Allowing others to put my images in a database and use them, perhaps to train a model to recognize me, feels like overreach.

    If you need data for your company, or your idea, what can you do? Many people just scrape Google, Facebook, etc., and get data. That might cause you some legal issues in some places, and you ought to be aware of the implications if you choose to do this, or you are asked to do this. I don’t think this is how we want data to be gathered. I know there are some guidelines for responsible AI at Microsoft, but not necessarily rules in place for many companies. Hopefully that will change over time.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Finding a Break

    Microsoft was one of the companies that dramatically pivoted to remote work. They enhanced their Teams product in a number of ways to help themselves, and their customers collaborate when people are not located in the same physical space. They also started to study the way in which people worked. I wrote about this last year, and they continue to study how work has changed, even though they are allowing workers back into offices.

    There is a new article that talks about the differences between workers and managers. Managers think they are thriving, and workers are not. There may be many reasons for this, but I suspect one of these is the privilege of space. Many managers and senior workers likely have bigger residences, and can spread out. They can change their locations and experience a new environment. Since so many of them might get by with less powerful laptops, and often work on a single item at a time, it’s easy to move from the kitchen to a dedicated office, to a bedroom, or even out on a deck.

    As a technical person, I’ve often felt cramped and crippled when I don’t have two monitors where I can see a lot of code and perhaps have a document or other information on another screen. Even when working with VSCode, I like having a separate terminal or place to test code, as opposed to ALT+TABing between windows. It’s not easy to move a couple of screens around my house.

    After a year of remote work, I still find many co-workers in cramped space situations. Working in a bedroom, a living room, or something else. Most of us haven’t built houses with the idea that we’d be in them working and living full time. With less places to go, I’m sure many in apartments, shared spaces, or even in houses with family feel cramped, stagnant, and even incarcerated.

    I also think that for many workers, there is unseen, and maybe implied, pressure to get more done. While some of this has existed in office spaces, I think the lack of contact with a manager might cause many workers to feel they have to prove they are really getting lots of work done.

    Some of the ideas from Microsoft, all of which appear to be connected to digital services, seem to miss the things most of us need. We need contact with other humans, a break from the digital world, and time in the analog world. We need a way to get away from devices, screens, and digital touch.

    I’m trying to do better myself, and I am encouraging those I know to find ways to take more breaks outside, in other rooms, or even a drive in a car. Now if we could find a way to ensure more management would support this, I think that we might get better engaged and creative workers.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Always Retry

    When multiple people connect to a SQL Server database and attempt to query or update rows, blocking occurs. This is normal, and we expect a certain amount of this, usually very short lived. If it’s not, then having tools that monitor your database and can quickly let you know which connection to kill is important.

    There are also issues like network hiccups and deadlocks, which can cause a transaction to fail and roll back. In these cases, the application should retry a query, often quickly, without bothering the user. This isn’t something that most developers code into their applications, though they should. However, is this something that lots and lots of developers ought to learn and re-implement over and over?

    Microsoft has released a preview of a configurable retry logic in the SqlClinet driver for .NET (others coming soon). With this enhancement, developers can tell the driver how to react with some types of connectivity errors and perhaps resubmit the query. There are various options you can read about, and you ought to carefully test and you decide to use before you deploy them to production.

    To me, this is long overdue. Software ought to work for us and make our work easier, including easier for software developers. Often I’ve heard many vendors point to the configuration options and flexibility of their software, tool, or framework, while placing the burden on developers to write a lot of the code to actually take advantage of the tool. Whenever possible, we ought to make the preferred choice, the best practice, the most common code an easy choice by making it easy to add to a system. Give people flexibility when they need it, but make it easy for them to see the benefits of your software quickly.

    Steve Jones