Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Crazy Times of Year

    Do you have busy times of the year that recur regularly? In some positions I’ve held, we had certain events or processes that always caused additional stress and headaches for employees. As a bartender, certain holidays (New Years, Halloween) were extra crazy. In one company, every quarter was an adventure involving a late, or a complete, night of work. Different industries and organizations seem to have different schedules that regularly stress employees.

    Are there times that are tough for you? Or maybe slow times? In a few organizations where my wife worked, the week between Christmas and New Years was always so slow that they’d actually close the office and give people the week off, without it affecting their vacation schedules. That would be a nice perk to have.

    This is the busy time of year for me. Spring sometimes gets filled, but this next couple months is somewhat crazy. The first third of September I was in the UK. I returned home, and I have a week and a half off, which I need because then life gets hectic.

    The weekend of the 20th, I’m heading back to upstate New York to see my daughter play in a volleyball tournament. That’s exciting since I’ve never seen her play college competition live, and I’m looking forward to the trip. A few days after I return, however, I head to Australia for work. Just a couple days, because I can’t spare the time, which is disappointing to my wife. She’s like to go, but since I’m in Memphis the first weekend of October, there isn’t time for a week in the beginning of Spring down under.

    I am home the second week of October, but with a pre-con and SQL Saturday, it will be a busy week of prep and trying to get other things done since the third week of October my wife wants to go back to New York to see our daughter. I’m tempted, but torn since the last week of of the month I return to London before heading to Seattle the weekend after.

    I still have other work to do with SQLServerCentral and Redgate in addition to these weekends, and I have the feeling I’ll be ready to knock off travel and just coach kids after the PASS Summit. Right now I’m looking at being committed for part or all of every weekend except for this past weekend until Nov 9.

    A tough time, but really, it’s a great job I have with amazing opportunities to see friends and places all over the world. I know I’ll be tired, but it will be a good tired, even with the extra time spent preparing for travel and catching up on chores when I return.

    Are there any wild times in your work world? Let us know today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Fantasy SQL Server

    This past week was the 118th T-SQL Tuesday (hosted by Kevin Chant) and it was a great one. Lots of people participated, with some really interesting entries. Kevin asked people to post their fantast T-SQL (or SQL Server) feature that they wish Microsoft would build. From better defaults and hints to a performance rating to CCI improvements to better partitioning, there are lots of creative solutions. Look for the recap this coming week.

    I didn’t write mine, mostly because I was out of the country and busy with SQL in the City Streamed and then some customer visits, as well as a mini-vacation in London with my wife. As a result, this slipped my mind, but my feature would be two phase authentication for a batch. I’d like a user to be able to submit a batch, have that held in a queue inside SQL Server until another user approved this feature somehow. The implementation doesn’t matter, but requiring two admins (or users) to run something would be fantastic for limiting rogue admins.

    What’s more, I’d use it to schedule something for the future that needed to be done, but I wasn’t sure when, like cleanup of some deployment. I’d write the trigger delete or other cleanup, leave it in queue and then have a job that reminds me of work that’s out there. When I’m ready, another account approves something.

    There were some good features submitted. I like Brent Ozar’s, restoring a single table, which is based on this suggestion with lots of votes. Not likely to happen because the backup process doesn’t know what’s on the pages, it just restores them. However, I’d think this could be added somehow with a scan of system tables inside the backup. Another simple one is better logging of job results. We’ve needed that for a long time, and that seems doable.

    If you didn’t participate, you can still write something, and even submit a suggestion to Microsoft. Doing a T-SQL Tuesday post is a great way to think and exercise your mind a bit. You might even have a great idea that someone notices and Microsoft picks up. You can still write your post and leave a comment on the invitation post.

    Steve Jones

  • Staying Focused

    Most of us know when we’ve been working in the flow. Time ceases to exist, and often seems to have flown by when we stop working. We may not eat or take a break, just focusing on a problem and tackling it in a very single minded fashion. Whether this is a development task or some infrastructure effort, we can achieve flow.

    At the same time, many of us struggle to find the flow in a busy workday of meetings, interruptions, music, slack messages, and more. Attention is a commodity, and one that many of us struggle to focus on a single task. We may find that if we do achieve flow and something interrupts us, then we struggle to get focused again.

    When I give presentations and talk about remembering what code we wrote or changes we made last week, plenty of people will chuckle along with me. It’s a challenge to remember what we were last doing, especially when we move to more DevOps style work with small chunks of tasks being completed. Even coming back to work the next day, after an evening of family or hobby time, can be distracting.

    How do you get back into the flow quicker? There are lots of books and advice around, but I thought this programmer’s look at how to keep himself organized around a busy life was interesting. He uses some tools, primarily based around software coding, to help remind himself quickly of not only what tasks need to be tackled, but where he was in the flow of the work. In some sense, this reminds me a bit of Andy Warren’s efforts at keeping SQL Saturday organized.

    Flow is hard to come by. To me, this is one reason why more workers ought to have private offices and less meetings. A developer or DBA in the middle of the zone, working in the flow, needs to be left alone. That’s the most productive time for them, when they are most efficient and valuable. More organizations ought to try and foster this, not inhibit it.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The State of DevOps Report for 2019

    It seems like just a few weeks ago that I went over the 2018 results with Gene Kim. That was an exciting few weeks for me, running over the report in prep and then having the opportunity to host a webinar with Gene Kim. Exciting times, but it’s been almost a year and the 2019 report is out. You can download the 2019 Accelerate: State of DevOps Report from the DORA site and read it yourself, but I found a couple interesting things in the report.

    As expected, companies adopting DevOps are outperforming those that don’t, at least in the metrics measured. In fact, it appears that the high performers continue to outperform low performers in two major ways: speed and stability. What’s interesting, and as was pointed out by Kendra, is that these aren’t on the same scale, meaning there isn’t a trade-off between the two metrics.

    You can move fast and achieve higher stability. In fact, moving fast can lead to higher stability if you are learning and growing from your efforts to build and deploy software. This includes the database, though that’s not called out in this year’s report. Instead, the report talks about ways to achieve speed and stability.

    One of those is tools, and more importantly, easy to use tools. Staff will turnover or change positions. Knowledge can be hard to share in busy environments, so tooling is important. Bespoke, bought, homegrown, open-source, it’s important that the tooling is easy to understand and that it performs at some job in an efficient manner.

    There are other items in the report, but one thing I think we often ignore is that sticking with your old process and people doesn’t mean you’ll fail. You clearly have some people and process in place that works, as you’re in business now.

    However.

    Both speed and stability help you work more efficiently. They help you compete better against others, and should ensure you reach your goals sooner. Speed increases value for customers, which in turn should help you improve how your organization functions. Stability makes both customers and staff happy. One thing the report points out: productivity has a positive impact on workers. They deal with stress better and burnout less.

    Happier employees are hopefully helping your organization with more creativity in solving problems, more engagement with customers’ success, and less turnover. DevOps is better for your software, and your staff.

    If you want to learn more, I’m hosting a webinar next week with Jez Humble to go over the report.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.