Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The 2019 Techie Gifts

    It’s Black Friday in the US, and I assume, most of the world. With the advent of so many online options, I’m not sure how big a day this is for many people, but there certainly are many deals from local retailers. While I do like to buy local, I don’t plan on doing any shopping today. It’s just too crowded and busy for me. Likely a day of chores around the ranch for me.

    There have been a number of Black Friday deals already going on for days. Brent Ozar has had a sale on training all month. Pluralsight had one last year, and I assume another coming. I expect there are other deals as well, but this week I wanted to talk about a few items that I use already or need to purchase. It’s the season for giving, so perhaps this will give you some ideas for the tech friends in your life.

    I have a couple wireless charging pads I use regularly: one on my desk and one by the bed. It’s fantastic to be able to pick up or put down my phone without wires. I also have quite a few long Anker cords for my phone (here’s a USB-C and a lightning one). The more I use a 6ft cable in different places, the more I appreciate the length. Especially when charging in a public place. To help, I also have a travel adapter with USB plugs. I’ve used this often in the US when I need to share an outlet with someone.

    I love music, and while I get by with cheap headphones often, I am tempted by a better set of noise cancelling ones. Maybe my wife will read this and get me something. She does carry a JBL speaker with us on trips, which we often use in our hotel room for some nice ambiance. I also carry around a wireless HDMI adapter, which comes in handy on the road, for work and pleasure.

    I’m about ready to get a new laptop, and I’ll likely go with an HP Spectre again, though the Lenovo X1 and the Dell XPS both look really nice. I’m still debating, and if there’s a good sale this weekend, I might grab one. These days I think most laptops will do the job for me, but I like the small, lightweight ones for traveling. I’ve had no shortage of adapters, but I am thinking to get a small USB-C hub that might work well for a variety of tasks.

    I’ve tended to stay away from any of the voice powered devices, mostly for privacy reasons. I have an older tablet, but most of the time my phone or laptop are what I use, so I don’t have a need there, but the new iPads look really nice, as do the Galaxy’s. I have a smart watch, and I love it. I certainly see the appeal of the Apple Watch or the Galaxy Watch. It’s on my list to pull down my data and start playing, something every data pro might enjoy.

    There’s a lot more to the holiday season than shopping, but since it’s a big part of today, I wanted to list a few items that I’ve enjoyed, and encourage you to add more in the discussion. Perhaps you’ll give someone a good idea for a gift, or an item to put on their list.

    Disclosure: These links are affiliate links for me, and I get a small commission from any purchases.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Pyramid of Data

    Data is an important part of our world, and arguably the most important asset in computing. All the rest of the devices, platforms, and technologies we use are designed to work with data, by manipulating, storing, accessing, and presenting data in new ways. We need devices and operating systems to host software, and applications to work with data, but the data is the key to fuel for every engine.

    I see there being a pyramid of data, with various technologies that are used to store and work with data. This is roughly how I see things, with various sources that store data as the foundation, and then systems to summarize and aggregate data, a new layer of analytics with Data Science, and the ever present ways of interacting with the data in order to use it for insights and decisions.

    (SSRS) (Visualizations) (Excel) (Power BI)
    (Data Science) (Artificial Intelligence) (Machine Learning)
    (Data Warehouses) (Data Marts) (ETL) (Data Streams) (Linked Data Sources)
    (SQL Server) (Oracle) (CosmosDB) (ElasticSearch) (Redis) (HDFS) (MongoDB) (PostgreSQL)

    That’s been my traditional view of the data pyramid, but cloud computing, the orchestration of containers, and better ways of analyzing data without moving it lead me to think that this is becoming more of a mesh inside the pyramid that multiplexes connections between layers. While I do think AI and ML systems will become more and more useful to a wider variety of applications and organizations, I do think the adoption will move more slowly than the hype suggests. Likewise, I think containers will grow slowly as there is a need to rearchitect many applications.

    Certainly cloud computing is becoming more and more commonplace. I especially am starting to see more smaller organizations taking advantage of cloud platforms that build SaaS, not for large scales, but for very small scale organizations. The platforms themselves are constantly lowering the cost of engaging with the cloud at small scales, and making it more feasible for application developers to deliver tremendous value and capabilities to very small organizations that aren’t, and don’t want to be, software companies. They just need services and capabilities without a lot of effort. The Power platform from Microsoft is likely to accelerate this with easy development for any semi-skilled software developer.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • DR Priority

    Those of us that act as DBAs or sysadmins for database systems know that DR is a point of emphasis for us. We usually spend plenty of time ensuring backups are working and practicing restores. The automated scripts and processes that people use are some of the most popular and discussed topics on SQLServerCentral.

    However, we can’t ensure every system is protected at the same level. It’s not cost effective to cluster or build AGs with hot standbys, or even warm standbys, for many databases. Often our organization will ensure some are ready to go and others will have to be dealt with if there are issues.

    William Durkin noticed recently that O’Reilly hadn’t prepared well enough for their learning site. They were affected by the fires and power outages in California and since they host some of their systems in an on-premises data center, there were issues. Certainly we might think they hadn’t prepared well for DR, and perhaps this is a fair view of their service, but perhaps they made the decision not to built out an expensive DR environment for a service that can tolerate some downtime.

    This week, I wonder how some of you look at the systems you support. Perhaps you are the person that has to make decisions, or perhaps your organization doesn’t fund DR well. I’m wondering, how do you decide which systems don’t get enough DR support?

    Certainly there are inexpensive, perhaps crafty ways that some people might plan for DR. I know I’ve cobbled together systems from spare parts to use for testing restores, with the idea that the hardware might need to be an emergency DR server for a single system or two in the event of an incident. If you’ve got ideas on how to be prepared even without organizational support, let us know today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Redgate Way

    Recently Matt Hilbert, from Redgate Software, wrote a piece on our blog about our journey to DevOps. It’s a great read, summing up some of the things that we’ve learned in our journey across the last decade. Matt is a great writer, and it’s worth a few minutes of your time to check it out and think about all the things that we’ve been through.

    I’ve known some people at Redgate for 18+ years, and I’ve worked there for 12, so I’ve had the chance to see quite a few changes. When I started, teams worked for long periods of times, in what is really a waterfall methodology. They went through substantial phases of development, testing, and beta releases, with Brad McGehee and myself having plenty of time to learn a product and then know it would be stable for a year or so.

    That slowly started to change, as Matt describes, with teams moving to new methods of building software, experimenting and learning. The Prompt team was one of the most ambitious, working in pair programming and finding ways to release almost on demand. Over time, other teams caught up and built some amazing processes. We even had two teams working on some products, with alternating two week sprint cycles to allow them to release every week. That was an impressive coordination of software development teams.

    Even today, I’m constantly impressed by teams. They aren’t all always rock stars, but they often exceed my expectations. I will see some slowdowns when teams change their people, process, or tooling, but then they will leap forward. The Data Masker team has been impressive lately, with some fantastic productivity improvements being added to the software. I apologized recently for not taking the Data Catalog team seriously for almost a year, but they have done more than I ever imagined with that tool in the last six months.

    We do continue to improve our software development skills at Redgate. We do release often, but really, we try to also improve the quality of our software, improve the skills of our developers, while working to retain talented individuals and help them enjoy their chosen career. We still produce bugs, we never get everything done as fast as sales, marketing, or even me, would like, but I do think that the last ten years has been an incredible growth as set of software development teams. Now our challenge is more closely aligning all teams to work in a loosely coupled, but tightly integrated fashion.

    DevOps is really a better way to build software for most organizations and teams. It often doesn’t change a lot about the actual code we write, but it does get developers, infrastructure staff, and management to rethink how we work, especially how we work together. That’s the hardest part to get through to many customers. This isn’t an install-a-tool-and-things-are-great system. Tools do help, but your attitude, your focus, and your willingness to work as a team are more important.

    Read about our journey. We’ve taken 1,000 steps, but there is more for us to learn, change, and implement as we move forward. Think about how you would want to change things at your company, and maybe pass this along to your manager. It’s not easy, and it might not be quick, but it’s an incredible journey. It’s also very much worth the time and effort you put into it.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.