Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Building or Buying Analytics

    One of the decisions that I’ve been involved with at the beginning of every software project is whether to buy software to solve the problem or build our own. This might be a quick “is there software anyone knows about to do this?” query, or an in-depth review of the marketplace or something in between. Often it’s a limited discussion on whether we think the problem is close enough to one other organizations have. If so, let’s buy something. If not, we might need to build an application to get what we want. Key card software for our doors? Buy it. Managing our core business flow, I might buy this.

    Analytics, or what has often fallen under the umbrella of business intelligence (BI) is an area where technology groups often wonder what’s best. I have seen no shortage of decisions in the past for how best to implement this feature for our organization. Ultimately, I think this piece summarizes this well: time will make the decision easier.

    If you need this done now, buy it. If you don’t have development resources, buy something. If you need similar analytics to what many companies need, buy this. Do you trust vendors to spend enough time on security, buy their service.

    Those are good reasons to adapt your process, your view, your requirements. If you can be flexible, it makes sense to buy some software that provides analytics for your data. Many companies have had success with purchased products, like Tableau, Qlikview, Cognos, Power BI, or some other pre-built package that allows users to analyze their own data. You might even just give them access to all views (or even tables) and ignore the entire part of your business.

    If you have time, however, I do find that developers working with analysts can truly add value and insight to the information a business holds. They can be responsive, while also providing knowledge about ways to structure and summarize data, and perhaps even identify those places where the way in which we gather and use data ought to change, perhaps even add new data elements.

    I do like the self-service, pre-built packages for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that users can do some Proof of Concept work themselves. I think Power BI Desktop is one of the best ways to do this today, using existing data sources that users can access. Let them go crazy and try whatever wild idea they have with data. When they find something useful, something that others need to also access, and something that becomes important to the organization, then it’s likely time to involve IT to provide stabliity. If there are also ways to better structure the information and perform a more detailed analysis, this might also be the time to customize the way the analytics package works, and again Power BI provides the ability to do this.

    Making this decision is hard, and it might not ever be done, but I do think buying is a good place to start, especially with the wide variety of packages out there, but you might find yourself changing your mind as your analytic needs mature.

  • Republish: Microsoft Exercise

    Today is SQL in the City – Christchurch. Excited for the event, but busy that day. You get a repeat of “Microsoft Exercise“.

  • Cloud Pace

    Recently, a user responded on SQLServerCentral to something I’d written on Azure, asking how do I keep up with all the changes. I wrote back: “Between the complexity and pace of change, I’m always learning something.”

    To be clear, I don’t really keep up. Even just trying to read all the Azure Announcements can be overwhelming, especially if you want to set up a quick demo on any of them. Even trying to get through the (free) e-book, The Developer’s Guide to Azure, was a chore. There were so many things I hadn’t heard of or barely knew about that I had to stop myself from logging in and trying something to get to the end.

    The Cloud isn’t really anything new. Not very new. All the IaaS stuff has been around for a long time, where you could rent a machine from some data center owner. The PaaS stuff is a little new in its implementation, but the idea is what many developers have dealt with in organizations where they didn’t have any administrative privileges. The database was just a database, no server involved.

    The biggest change I see with the “cloud” is the pace of change. Companies lose some of the overhead of dealing with different departments and getting resources provisioned. Because cloud vendors are working at scale, they’ve built tools that allow customers to spin up new VMs, databases, even clustered systems in minutes. Much of the tedious complexity has been removed, which allows users to just move forward with building systems.

    The move towards DevOps, with a focus on automation, means that vendors also build new platforms, capabilities, and options that we can use at a furious pace. The choices we have can be overwhelming at times, with no one person really able to keep up with the myriad of possibilities.

    To me, this means two things for your company. First, you always need to have some experiments running. No proof of concepts that will be turned into applications, but true developer or operational experiments where people try out an elastic pool or machine learning or a K8s replica set of Hello, World containers. Your staff needs to be learning and sharing with each other in small ways.

    The second thing is that you need to limit the technologies in use. While there are many amazing and useful new services, you can’t bounce between them and support an unlimited number of choices. Limit the number of technologies (languages, frameworks, platforms, services, whatever) to the few that get the job done, with a process to add new ones if a rational case can be made.

    The bottom line is that it is important to keep learning, evolving and using better technology over time, but we have to be sure that most of our time is spent working on the software we’re building, using the knowledge we already have. We’re paid to get work done and while learning is a part of that, it’s a small part. Mostly we need to be doing the other parts of our jobs.

    Steve Jones

  • Republish: The Worst Comments

    Still on holiday, probably near Queenstown. Read The Worst Comments again.