Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Old Way or the New Way

    Many of us are employed because of our talent and experience. We get things done and our organization values what we do. We got this position because we did something well, as a DBA, developer, manager, or some other role.

    It’s natural that we feel confidence in our abilities and knowledge. However, that shouldn’t prevent us from learning new skills, techniques, and patterns for getting work done. As much as many of us want to feel we regularly learn in technology, I often find that customers, clients, and friend struggle to change their habits.

    Why is this? There is a good post on the topic that looks at why people want to use the old way. It’s from the perspective of the developer that shows something to a client, but I think this applies to many parts of our world. Making change has an effort, and the effort needs to have a high enough return to be worth making a change.

    In terms of development, do we change our efforts when something is slightly better? Perhaps, especially if there security or resource changes could be high for our final deployment. What about if the changes are most nebulous, like slightly less technical debt? Or if there is a chance for more future flexibility in the design? The benefits we get back are sometimes hard to measure.

    The changes also need to be considered for a team. A change for my coding habits might be low with little disruption to my workflow, but the change for a team of 10 is a multiple of the effort. We all have to make a change, and that can disrupt an entire sprint, or a series of sprints if our focus and rework increase as everyone tries to adapt.

    My general rule of thumb is that some change has to be at least 20% better in some way. It has to make a fundamental difference to be worth the effort. This is one reason I never moved from Google to Bing. Bing works fine, but it’s not 20% better. I’m not sure it’s 1% better. It’s different, and that has a high cost to me to change.

    Moving to new ways of working can be good, but the movement needs to be careful and slow, especially in a team environment. However, we also need to learn to move more when there are enough benefits. We sometimes forget that last part.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Follow Wheaton’s Law

    I’ve tried to live my life as someone that treats others well, respects them, and cheers for them to succeed. Even before I heard it, I think I was unconsciously following Wheaton’s Law (apologies for the slightly off color language).

    I think about this often in my life, as a minority in most places I go for work or in society. I’ve had a lot of success, I’m intelligent, am comfortable talking with people, and many things go my way. At the same time, I’m not any better than anyone else. I try to say hi to the facilities staff at Redgate in the same way I do with my fellow advocates. I may sit and chat with our cooks or cleaning staff just as I might take a moment to chat with a developer.

    With the dramatic changes brought about in our world by the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been thinking about the way that many people are interacting with those who work in much of the public world. Especially service workers, who these days may be deemed essential and are often the contact we have with lots of businesses, as cashiers, delivery people, and more.

    This article upset me. Many people that have the least power, the depend on their jobs the most, with few other options, are often treated poorly by the people they encounter. I’ve seen poor behavior in the past in many situations, but the current pandemic and the push back against wearing masks has made things worse.

    The entry level workers, those making low wages and doing many of the service jobs in our world, don’t deserve to be poorly treated because you don’t like the policy of some business. This certainly includes people doing manual work in our offices, acting as assistants, or some other non technical job. Treat other people well, as you’d want to be treated if someone didn’t like the way you were instructed to do your job.

    Steve Jones
    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Computing Revolution

    One of the keynotes at this year’s Build conference was on the Future of Tech. This was a mix of live talk and recorded pieces from Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft. This talk looks at the innovation of tech, with lots of AI/ML, but also with the idea that data is fundamental to the future. While he notes that there are different eras in computing as we have breakthroughs, one of the fundamental things that will change the world is the data explosion.

    We constantly push through boundaries and past constraints that limited us just a few years ago. I can still remember a professor in college bragging about the 32MB of RAM in his Solaris workstation, at a time when many of us had 1,2, or maybe 4MB. I think about that each time I get a new device. In a generation of my life, we’ve grown an order of magnitude, and pushed into a new world where I don’t have an exponential level of computing on my desk, but in my pocket.

    We might appreciate or worry about the growth of data, and it’s implications, or we may get excited and embrace it. Either way, big data is coming, and it continues to come to many organizations. While most of us aren’t pushing 10TB+ databases, some of us are, and few of us think in MB anymore. Makes you think that perhaps the default settings in SQL Server for MB in some cases are silly. Surely a MB is a like a penny (or pence in the UK), take one, leave one, but they don’t really count. Not until there are hundreds of them, and even then, maybe only a thousand is worth much mental effort.

    I do agree that the big win with the Internet, and with many pieces of software, isn’t the platform, but the ways in which people take advantage of the platform. I think that the creativity of developers, taking advantage of incredible computing on mobile, is what has created an amazing revolution. However, it’s not really just the creative software, but the understanding and use of data at scale that has really enabled software to change the world. Access to lots of data, whether this is people wanting car rides, sharing their thoughts and images, or just the bits that make up the music of the world are the ways in which software can become incredibly popular. Also, this is how things might get incredibly dangerous.

    I do think that AI has the chance to become an inflection point in computing, helping to create more applications that will work with humans in new ways that harness our knowledge, ethics, and vision with the computing power that continues to grow in incredible ways.

    The keynote is an interesting watch. It’s about 45 minutes, but if you want to dream a bit, it’s worth your time.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Ultimate Home Office

    When the pandemic hit, we were fairly well prepared at Redgate. We’ve had lots of experience connecting offices, we have an amazing IT staff that has built a great VPN setup, lots of SSO authentication, and a tremendous KB of info.

    However, many of our staff didn’t have a dedicated space in their residence. Even those that did often had to share with partners, children, and others. That was a challenge. I know because we created a Slack channel for people to share their work space pictures. I saw some creative solutions, and I also sympathized with way some people have had to work during the last few months.

    I’m lucky that I’ve been working from home a long time and have made some changes over the years to build a better home office. I’ve upgraded PCs, added some lights, gotten a standing desk, etc. in that time. The pandemic got me to finally upgrade to a Secret Lab chair and adding a ring light for video calls. I also rearranged the office slightly after refinishing our floors.

    After seeing Troy Hunt’s post this week on his ultimate home office, I’m a little jealous. Not that I want to spend that much time and money on my office, or do all the IoT and other configuration, I am still interested as a geek in what he did. It’s quite a write-up, and if you go through it, those of you that are hardware geeks will probably enjoy it and then frown at your setup. You might also get jealous if you read about some of the systems Glenn Berry has built, Brent Ozar’s home office, or even the studio that Adam Saxton has built.

    For now, I’m pretty happy with my home office, though I still have a few minor things to work on. A little more cable management, perhaps a few small storage boxes/places for my desk, and certainly a little sweeping and mopping. That last one is something that needs to be done on a more regular basis, at least while the pandemic is stuff affecting me.

    Steve Jones