Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Take Care of People

    Many organizations are undergoing changes. The pandemic of the last year has them rethinking their physical spaces, but also the need to hire in their local area only. Add to this the cloud transformation that seems to be a growing trend in many organizations and industries. Then we have the DevOps changes occurring in technology, affecting developers, testers, and operations staff.

    As I’ve learned more about this, listened to stories, and watched presentations, one thing I think starts to stand out for the high performing organizations is their commitment to taking care of people. Not everyone, but most of them giving them education, opportunities, and options.

    As we adopt DevOps, or really any substantial change, we may find that our existing staff doesn’t fit the new paradigm, or we need more or less of them. Good companies work with people, they help them, transition and adapt. They reassure them that change doesn’t mean a loss of a job, even if their current role is going away.

    I’ve seen big companies do this. Microsoft, American Airlines, and Capital One do this, among others. They create pathways and help staff gain skills and find opportunities. Not everyone wants to continue forward, but they do have the choice to do so.

    If your company wants to transform, or you want them to, don’t forget that part of this journey is bringing people along with you. Creating pathways that help both the technology and the staff get to a new place from where they are today.

    Steve Jones

  • Nothing on My Laptop

    I heard this quote at the recent Redgate Summit: “If I drop my laptop in water, I can get everything back.” The context of the quote is that all your work, your IP, your code, etc. is saved in some common or duplicate location. Everything essentially has a backup.

    I learned the lesson early in my career that keeping one copy around of things was bad. On an old Apple II, I formatted the wrong disk numerous times, necessitating me recreating homework multiple times on a very tight schedule. Over the years, I often made sure I had some backup service, but things really changed for me about ten years ago.

    I had a laptop die on me while on the road. I had copies of things in different places, and a backup service, but I had to buy a new machine and get things set up quickly. It was a pain, but I started to adopt the DevOps idea of improving my system and learning what worked. Today’s cloud services, as well as package managers (Chocolatey) helped me. A few years ago my laptop blue screened and I had to reformat the drive and rebuild everything for a presentation the next day.

    It took my about 3 hours, thanks to code, documents, and more stored and available in different services. These days, I think I was up and running on a new laptop in tens of minutes, and had most of my bits available in Explorer or inside an application in a little over an hour.

    These are great habits to ensure I can continue to work, and good for home where I don’t want to lose photos or other digital assets.  These are also good ideas for shared work inside an organization, whether on workstations or servers. Don’t operate without a way to rebuild systems, including configuration and data, if something fails. Cultivate cattle, not pets, as the DevOps people say.

    Steve Jones

  • Imposter or Student

    If you’re moving forward in your career, you’re a bit of an imposter. Actually, according to David Perell, everyone is an impostor. Many of the very successful people in technology built things that they knew nothing about. They learned technology, business, sales, and more on their way to success.

    I posted a note about the video above, and someone suggested that we are students instead. The negative connotation of an impostor, someone that deliberately fakes their knowledge is something that bothers many. I get that, and I do understand the desire to disclose what you know and what you don’t.

    We need to be lifelong students in the technology business, and maybe even in many other fields. The platforms on which we work, the tools we use, they do change. More importantly, the underlying technology we use might suddenly change as our employers shift directions or management moves in a new direction.

    While it’s useful to adopt the mindset of being a student, there are plenty of times when we are asked to work with something we don’t understand. Others may assume we know something and look to us to lead the way or solve problems. While we may protest or let them know that we are learning, we are still expected to produce some results.

    When I coach kids, we often tell them to “fake it until they make it.” They are learning new skills and sometimes don’t do well, but it is important to project an air of confidence, to believe that you will soon learn the skill. That mental projection of your future is important, and it instills confidence. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of believing in yourself, even when you lack some ability.

    When you tackle something new, do you consider yourself an impostor or student? Either way, I hope you dive into the tasks with enthusiasm and confidence.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Cloudy Future in 2021

    Ignite took place recently, and the keynote from Satya Nadella was interesting, and if you have time, interesting to watch. If not, there’s an excerpt in written form. In any case, I like his passion and excitement about the future. I’m slightly sad that he’s not on stage somewhere, and instead in a studio of some sort, but that’s the world today.

    There were five pillars of the keynote which related to the future of the cloud. One of these was the idea that we are at “peak centralized computing” now, but we need to get more decentralized. The idea here, I think, is that we will have more of the computing services taking place outside of data centers and server rooms, and in more devices. We already see some of this, with mobile devices, cars, sensors, and more handling some computing loads.

    The Edge is something Microsoft continues to push, and I think the adoption of this paradigm will continue, with some pre-processing or filtering occurring in devices or intermediate servers, and then less, or limited, data being loaded into our database platforms. I also expect that we’ll see more data loaded into a database somewhere, and less ETL into another platform and more just in time querying from a client or other data store.

    I was also glad that trust was a pillar, though I think this was an attempt to corral a number of disparate ideas into one topic. However, the idea of data protection, and individual rights such as privacy, are important, and I do think that Microsoft recognizes this. Even if they are just trying to build a product to profit, I appreciate the work they are doing in this area, adding new capabilities to allow companies to better control, limit access, and protect data in flexible ways. Now, if we can just get the companies to respect the individual’s data they hold, I think the world will be better.

    Lots of what Microsoft presents in their keynotes and conferences is aspirational, with limited experience or understanding of whether customers really will adopt these ideas. Every year I see some visions that don’t ever get widely used across the next year and aren’t mentioned the next year. However, some of their ideas are good, and some will evolve in different ways to help improve our world. This year, I loved seeing the remote ways HoloLens 2 is being used.

    I never know what will catch on, but I do like seeing the visions that others have for our world.

    Steve Jones