Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Micro Credentials

    For all of my career, there has been a constant debate about the value of certifications. Early on I saw one boss move ahead because of his CNE (Certified Netware Engineer) credential. That got me moving in that direction, though I switched to an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) track once Windows gained prominence and I found myself working in that arena.

    These days there seem to be less certifications around in one sense. Certainly Microsoft and other vendors are spending less effort building and maintaining a program. At the same time, there is a variety of different products that you can get certified in using online learning. A friend recently showed me the Redis University where you can complete courses and get a certificate. We even have Redgate University, designed to help you improve your ability to use our products.

    Like many credentials, completing a course doesn’t mean you are an expert, or competent, or even qualified with a product. There are numerous stories of people holding credentials and being unable to perform simple tasks in the real world. I’d counter with the fact that there are plenty of people with lots of experience on paper that equally cannot perform fairly rudimentary tasks. I do think that people that have made an effort to complete some course have likely learned something.

    Microsoft Philanthropies is experimenting with micro credentials, an idea of helping people to learn skills and tasks that aren’t equivalent to formal education, but perhaps can take the place of other educational opportunities, such as a college degree. It’s an interesting idea, and it fits nicely with my thoughts that your career requires continual learning and improvement, or as they put it, up-skilling.

    There is a great quote in the article:  “Careers are no longer ladders. They are more like vines in a rainforest. You can swing on one and then grab another.” I think that’s true in technology, and likely true in many other fields as well. I’ve seen plenty of issues with workers trying to undertake year+ long programs to retrain in some other field, only to find out there aren’t enough jobs or the skills are becoming obsolete quickly.

    The future, in my mind, is that we need to be adaptable and flexible. We should have some basic skills, like logical problem solving and communication, but the specific syntax and muscle memory to work on any particular implementation are something we need to pick up quickly and gain competence in without a long learning period. This doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t valued, but flexibility and the willingness to continue to improve skills over time is more valuable.

    Will this replace traditional universities in our business? I don’t know, but I do think it could. There are still places where a formal education is valuable and useful, but I’m not sure if it matters in the field of technology. At the same time, unless organizations that hire individuals stop requiring four year degrees, I’m not sure this matters. I hope they do, because a degree says something about you, but not necessarily more than other experiences and efforts that you can undertake.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Learning from Exercise

    A long time ago I decided to run every day. I did for a bit, in fact, I had a neat milestone along the way and continued on for 1564 days. That was quite a memorable period in my life, and one that I look back upon fondly. I’ve aged a bit, and while I could do it again, I also have decided there are other things that matter more to me, so I have moved on in life.  I learned a lot from that time, lessons about myself and life that continue to help me today. Some of them even apply to work and my career, little nuggets of wisdom that help me find ways to find success in my life.

    Apart from some better fitness, one of the main benefits for me was the sense of accomplishment. I had no bad days where I would think I wished I had run. None. That seems obvious, but it also provided me some comfort that I had moved things forward in my life. I took that lesson back to work, where I sometimes have bad days. I have days where nothing goes right, or I have people that take over my day and schedule.

    I know there are also a number of things that I need to do at work, which aren’t that important, or even aren’t that critical, but they provide a measure of satisfaction that I’ve moved things forward. These days that is often getting things scheduled for the newsletter. In the past it might be doing a little space extrapolation (though I’d just look at this in SQL Monitor today). Low value items, but I get some accomplishment in the midst of otherwise stressful times when I get something small done that is on my list.

    The other thing that came from the running streak was the feeling of getting away from other parts of my life. Whether with family or work, I might be overwhelmed or stressed or otherwise out of sorts in my day. Taking 20-30 minutes for myself was a way of resetting my day, and it was a welcome break. While exercise is my thing, and even today it’s a priority around work, I’ve had other crutches that help me cope. I love to read, so taking 5 minutes to escape in a book every day is something that feels similar to exercise.

    I know other friends that might play a short game, play with a pet. Having some other consistent, distracting activity is a good release when things are tough. No matter how busy we are, or what’s broken, taking 5, 10, 15 minutes away can help refresh you and get you ready to go back into the trenches and deal with others.

    I’m sure jobs exist that can’t spare the time, but I’ve never had one. I haven’t always realized it until later, but I wish someone had told me to take 10 minutes away in a crisis to reset myself and then come back. I know I’ll remember that the next time I end up being stressed during an IT problem at work.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • True HA and DR

    For many years, SQL Server administrators have tried to ensure their systems run smoothly by executing DBCC commands against their production databases. As workloads have grown, this has become an issue with resource contention with production users. Backups have had the same issue, and the smart DBAs have offloaded this work to another server. With the more recent versions of SQL Server, we could move backups and DBCC checks to secondary systems.

    The problem with this has been licensing. Microsoft has required a secondary node (often referred to as passive, which Allan Hirt notes is incorrect) to be separately licensed if any activity is performed, which includes DBCC. We could have a secondary system receiving data as a part of Software Assurance licensing, but no activity on this system. A common misunderstanding, and a long and often raised complaint by customers.

    That has changed as of Nov 1, 2019. Microsoft posted a blog that now lets us use those secondary systems for a number of purposes. We can now run DBCC, log and full backups, and monitor resource usage data on a secondary system without requiring licensing. What’s more, we can now have multiple secondary systems that are not separately licensed for both HA and DR purposes.

    Perhaps best of all, this isn’t limited to SQL Server 2019. This is in effect for all supported SQL Server systems. With SQL Server 2012 in Extended Support, I would assume this would apply there. The caveat is that you need Software Assurance (SA) on the licensed systems. You don’t get this for free, but many organizations get SA to allow them to upgrade, and this will be a welcome addition to the value for SA.

    I think this should have been the way that licensing worked forever, as I’d argue DBCC isn’t a workload, but a verification that things are working appropriately. SQL Server should detect this stuff automatically to me, but since it doesn’t, this isn’t any active workload. Neither are backups. Finally, Microsoft agrees.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Network Bottleneck

    Most of us know that sending extra data back in a result set is a waste of resources. This can certainly cause delays and poor response in our apps, and across slow networks, this can even cause timeouts. Good developers try to limit the data transfer to just the data necessary, without pulling back extra fields. This is one reason a “SELECT *” is a bad idea.

    What about when we are sending just the data we need, but that data is so voluminous that we can’t easily transmit it across a network. That’s one of the ideas that is noted in this piece, which asks for innovation in the way that we move data around, especially IoT data. This type of data is growing, and potentially growing across networks that are bandwidth constrained, such as satellite and cellular links.

    Do many of you find that your network links are constrained? I certainly do at times, though I live in a place where the broadband and cellular networks are not very robust. Even so, most of the time I never notice issues with moving data around. Even when using a real time application, such as streaming data.

    Perhaps there are tricks that buffer data and hide network issues, but even if that is the case, is there a problem? After all, that’s part of what our applications should do: isolate and protect us from the inherent unreliability of hardware.

    Relational databases continue to store and process larger amounts of data all the time. Size of data operations, which grow increasingly cumbersome as data volumes grow, are a place where many vendors are trying to improve their offerings. Microsoft is one of these, and some of the improvements in SQL Server 2019, with Big Data Clusters, Accelerated Database Recovery, and scale out architectures are designed to precisely help us cope with more data.

    I have confidence that we will continue to solve these problems, and that networks will keep growing to support the demands of our ever increasing database sizes. We just need to be sure we continue to evolve and grow our applications to take advantage of these improvements.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.