Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Republish: Serious Hacking

    I’m off today, attending the MVP Summit in Washington. Enjoy Serious Hacking.

  • Dealing with Failure

    This past week was a dichotomy for Coloradans. On Tuesday, it was 60F (15C) for most of the day, with my daughter and I going to volleyball practice in t shirts and shorts. Our phones chimed during practice, noting that schools had been cancelled for Wednesday, in anticipation of a winter storm. Plenty of people laughed about that at the time, and no shortage of parents were annoyed by the premature decision, especially with little wind and rain falling at 7am Wednesday.

    That changed with high winds and some snow all over the area. Cars were stuck on roads, first responders overwhelmed, the airport closed, and people stuck in places between home and work. We hunkered down here at the ranch, and while horse care was hard, we survived. Power flickered for me, but I was able to work Wed and Thur without worry. I also have a generator, but we never lots power longer than the 30s it takes to kick in.

    Glenn Berry wasn’t quite as lucky, though he came through the storm fine. He did lose power, and wrote about his experiences. Glenn is about 12 miles S of me, and in a rural area. I thought his thoughts on the experience were interesting, and not a lot different from the ones I had recently with another power outage. I don’t mind storing gasoline, and we have multiple generators here because of the horses, but I appreciate Glenn’s thoughts on finding a different way of storing power.

    We both realize that disaster can strike and it’s important to think through the issues ahead of time. While I depend on my phone in the event of losing our Internet connection, I could easily lose that as well. The local towers probably run off batteries and in an extended outage, they’d lose power before I would. I have a tractor and can plow out our driveway, but in this case, the county roads were closed Wednesday and Thursday due to the poor conditions and number of cars stranded. Apparently Wed night visibility was inches and cars were being abandoned in the middle of roads. I’d prepared for a few days outage, but if this were still ongoing today, I’d start feeling the pinch from a lack of supplies.

    It’s not often we encounter a major disaster at work, but it’s entirely possible that the secondary support plans we have in place won’t work. You might have a supplier for more diesel fuel, but if everyone else needs more, will you still get some? What about issues with a complex process at work? If it fails and you end up rebuilding some ETL flow, do you have the staff or are you expecting a “Brent” to help explain things and do some of the work? I think plenty of us have that dependency, one which we don’t think about until that person is on holiday and we need their expertise.

    Disasters come in all sizes, but often they seem to come in the size that is at the limit (or just beyond) our preparations. I suggest that during some down times, take a minute and think about your preparations. Think what could go wrong. Do a little brainstorming and gaming of situations. If your plan has an issue, do you have another idea of what to do? It might be good to at least have thought about the potential issues.

    Steve Jones

     

  • How Long is Too Long?

    After SQL Bits this year, there was a discussion on Twitter about the length of the sessions and what attendees would like to see. The event ran 50 minute sessions, and that wasn’t appreciated by some speakers. It’s an odd length, and one that few events use. Even SQL Saturdays often do at least 60 minutes, though often I find larger conferences do 75 or 90 minute lengths. In response to some of the debates about short vs. long sessions, Brent Ozar Unlimited is running a poll as well. I’d encourage you to participate and help shape how conferences structure their schedules.

    I’ve somewhat argued against the shorter session for a conference, or really, at SQL Bits, because the short length is disruptive for me. I’ve got sessions I’ve prepared and given elsewhere. Some I’d like to give at Bits and some I’d update and adapt for the event, but cutting down from a 75 minute talk to 45 or 50 minutes is quite a bit of work. I know because I had a session last year that was accepted at multiple events. I had to give this in 30 minute, 60 minute, and 75 minute lengths, which was a challenge. I ended up building the 75 minute version and cutting things out, but it felt like I lost some flow and continuity at the different events. I think this was because it is just hard to practice different lengths and deliver them well.

    That’s me, and I’m a speaker. If I want to present, then I need to adapt, so some of my argument is because I would like to avoid some work. I practice sessions many times and work hard to build a smooth flow that attendees follow. Changing lengths means more practice for me. I’ll do it, but I’ll also think about skipping events that use weird times. 60 minutes isn’t too hard to get to from 75 minutes, but I still find myself rushing at the end. I know trying to fit down to 50 minutes would be hard. I definitely see lots of speakers that struggle to get their talk going, and often run out of time, which I think gets worse with shorter time frames.

    For the attendee, I have a different view. I actually think that shorter is better. At our SQL in the City Streamed events, we’ve experimented with sessions at 25, 35, 45, and 60 minute lengths. I like the shorter ones, which are more focused, and I do think that we can focus down on a topic more tightly in a 30-45 minute session. Strangely enough, I find the 15-20 minute sessions the hardest to build, often because I feel I have to jump right into the topic and the demos have to be very tight and reliable.

    SQL in the City Streamed, however, has no audience. No one to ask a question or slow the session down. Also no feedback to understand if I’m losing people because of a poor explanation. In a live event, I find that my pacing will vary slightly as I take questions or elaborate on a point. The shorter the session, the less time for this, but perhaps that’s fine. Questions can be handled later, or maybe even submitted to speakers who can publish answers on their blog or an event site.

    We deal with a lot of complex topics in technology, and I’d agree that many aren’t handled very well in short sessions, but I also think that complex topics aren’t handled well in 90 minutes either. Going to shorter session lengths means more slots during the day, maybe even more networking, and perhaps best of all, more breaks to stand up and move. If I were designing the ideal length, I do like 50 minutes, with a 10 minute break every hour. If a speaker needs more time, then build a 100 minute session and present in two parts, still with a break.

    Selfishly, I like longer sessions as a speaker where I can dig into topics and spend more time explaining concepts, demoing solutions, and developing a pace of delivery. As an attendee, I prefer shorter sessions, but I do expect more effort from speakers to be on point, have demos that flow smoothly and quickly, and don’t waste time on items that the audience should be expected to know. However, I’m also a member of the community and I’ll work with whatever decisions conference organizers make. I’d just prefer they stick close to each other with similar session lengths.

    Take Brent’s survey, but let me know in the discussion here what you prefer and why? Should you get shorter, more tightly focused sessions? Think about something you’ve seen recently and how it would be if you cut the length down or made it longer. Would the talk have been better or worse?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 6.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Soft Skill of Respect

    When I started to work more closely with the product development teams at Redgate Software, I found it interesting that we devoted so many resources to user experience, testing, and other non-development tasks. Coming from more focused groups, this was new to me. At times this felt like an indulgence, and at times a lot of overhead that slowed down the coding process. Over time, I’ve grown to appreciate having different skills in our teams.

    Not that we build software in the best way possible, and certainly not the quickest, but we have some well coordinated and knowledgeable teams. We’re still evolving and learning how to put together teams of people and effectively build software, but I think we’re moving in the right directions.

    As soon as I read this piece on hard and soft skills, I thought of Redgate and all the non-coding people that build our products. What struck me was how often I’d devalued non technical skills, but the more I work with our (and other) software, the more I appreciate that those other roles are important. The piece rambles and wanders around the point, but I do see that there are a couple important takeaways I get from this.

    First, we need to respect others that perform different work from us if we are going to build synergy in our teams. The synergy is creating something that none of us could do individually, or even separately. We get more done by working together and that means we must be a team. Teams only come from respect between individuals, and that includes the managers.

    The second thing that I realized, is that it is important to understand a basic level of what other jobs entail. Too often we data professionals have been upset that application developers don’t know more SQL. Many of us learn some of the domain specific knowledge of the data we deal with, in order to talk with customers, produce reports, etc. Following our own advice, we ought to know more about the development platforms, the challenges, their testability, and more, if for no other reason than we can better understand how the entire system works and can talk about it with others

    I certainly know that relationships and people are incredibly important in larger projects, which is another important takeaway from the article. We all do need to improve our hard skills, learning to code more efficiently and securely. We also need to remember the importance of softer skills, and the need for a wider variety of skills in our teams. A little appreciation for the need for more than expert level coders might help us create better teams that function more efficiently and help us produce better software.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.