Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • How Important Are Real Time Decisions?

    Imagine a perfect world? I have an AI agent that knows my business well. It’s getting real time input from sales, from customers, it makes amazing decisions. We get a large order? We need to ramp up production of our widgets. We have an order pipeline of xx widgets and we know over time that yy% will close. Let’s place a larger order with a supplier overseas.

    The next day, we have an election and tariffs are announced on imported parts. We react immediately, cancel the order, start the process to expand a local factory. We place ads to hire workers and order equipment. Things are looking good for our business and our factory will be up and running in a few months.

    The next week we find out the tariffs weren’t really being enforced, so they’re paused. Our AI agent re-places our large order for imported parts and tried to cancel the factory expansion. Of course, it calculates the costs of both sides before deciding, and perhaps consults with me on other uses of our local factory.

    How many times can we do this? Or rather, how many times would we let an AI agent keep adjusting our business?

    To be fair, humans might do the same thing and over-react, but mostly we become hesitant with unexpected news. That slowness can be an asset. We often need time to think and come to a decision. Lots of our decisions aren’t always based on hard facts, and a lot of business isn’t necessarily fact driven either. We often put our thumb on the scales when making decisions because there isn’t a clear path based on just data.

    Things can get worse when we collaborate. I used to run real-time reports for an importing company, and we found that executives would print a report, get busy, and after minutes (or hours), discuss the report with someone in a department. However, their numbers rarely matched because the reports were printed at different times. At first they lost trust in the system because the same report on the same day had different numbers. Even when we added a “print” or an “as of” time, the reports were too annoying to users to be helpful because the numbers didn’t match.

    Real time isn’t what most of us want. Except in the Olympics. There we want the photo finish right away.

    But not in all sports. A review is good. In the NFL, I’ve come to like instant reply. It’s gotten better/faster and often gives us the right answer. Not always, but often. It’s better, arguably, then just real-time humans.

    Real-time decisions and reactions can be good in some cases. Adjusting machinery, vehicles, electricity, etc. where we need too-quick-for-humans decisions based on data is a good place for real time data. Lots of business decisions we make aren’t the places where we really need real-time insights. Our human brains just don’t work that fast.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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  • SQL Server Licensing is Simple

    Over the years I’ve had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it’s felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide. Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you’re using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you’re running a workload on.

    It’s simple right?

    It can seem confusing, and at times I’ve wished Microsoft would make it simpler. And perhaps even give us some add-ons, like adding some additional hardware capabilities (cough more RAM *cough) in SE.

    Then I run into something like the introduction to Oracle licensing. This is one of the smaller guides on a site devoted to Oracle licensing. There are numerous articles on there, with lots of information, perhaps too much, to help anyone get a handle on this process. There are even companies (one, two) built around helping you manage Oracle licenses.

    There’s a core factor table, where you need to figure out how to adjust your “license cost” based on the CPU. That’s after you pick the edition, and likely before you go into the other features you might need. I’m guessing this is why a lot of people might just pay for the Unlimited license and stop worrying. I think this is also why Oracle is still such a huge company and worth billions (or trillions?) of dollars.

    I actually asked Claude to help me with Oracle licensing. I got these (partial) results, which talks about the different core licensing, editions, and then other costs. As I ask for more details in any area, this gets very complex and confusing. While some of the rules for SQL Server can be confusing, and certainly the HA and virtualization guidelines sometimes leave something to be desired, overall, I find things simple.

    I like simple.

    Over the years, many software companies have made licensing more complex and confusing to customers. Often this results in more profit for them without much benefit for the purchaser. Not all vendors do this, but Oracle certainly has created a complexity that spawned a whole business model for a few companies. SQL Server licensing is simpler, and I’ve learned to appreciate that.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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  • Don’t Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design

    If you graph computer/query cost against the size of data, you can get four quadrants:

    1. small data, small compute (most CRUD app queries)
    2. small data, big compute (complex BI queries for this quarter, most reporting)
    3. big data, small compute (logs, audit data)
    4. big data, big compute (complex BI queries across all our data)

    If you examine the costs here, 1 is the cheapest, with 2 and 3 having a similar cost. Number 4 is expensive, and it’s why we often have big boxes running our database server software. However, where is most of our work? The majority is in quadrant 1, with 2 getting the second most action. 3 might rarely exist, as does 4, but we often design for 4. We have to as we don’t want phone calls, ever. What we want is to provision a system large enough that we don’t hear many complaints about performance. On premises, many of us have over-provisioned systems to handle the peak load to avoid phone calls.

    Can we handle the peaks or the really important things that someone thinks are important? Everyone thinks their workload is important, and it is. To them. However, there are plenty of cases where someone could think about designing for specific types of workloads, rather than just aiming for quadrant 4. I’ve got an image of different types of workloads that I grabbed from the Small Data 2025 conference. For example, if I am working with things like Time Series data or streaming analytics, I might not need huge compute. I might be storing a lot of data, and I need space, but the compute is low. The analysis of that data, however, might be compute intensive.

    This is a reason why we might separate analytic systems out as they often are in quadrants 2 and 4, and we might want serverless or scale up/down systems to handle the rare cases, and get a real cost for them. I found it particularly interesting that the Bronze tier might be where we have big data and big compute, but once we’ve moved to Silver or Gold, we might have lower compute and data requirements. This makes sense as Bronze is more staging, but it is a good reason why we might aim for a Gold layer in our organization and only keep that data for the long term; it’s more cost-effective.

    Often, for simplicity, we build a bigger system for all types of queries. In other words, we are letting corner cases drive our design. That might be required, but it might not be. In this area of cost concerns, especially in the cloud, designing systems with appropriate resource usage is something that might override the analyst’s desire for queries across all data running as quickly as order lookups in an OLTP system. This might be even more true if we can predict some patterns in our workloads during system design. We can’t scale up or down instantly, but in a lot of places, I wish I had been able to scale financial or reporting systems up for a few days as we close out the period and scale them down for the rest of the month.

    When building a system, think about the practical nature of your requirements and assign a cost to them. Let users know what workload you’re building a system to handle and set expectations on performance and cost. If you do that, you can let others decide when we handle corner cases and when we don’t. That’s often a much easier conversation when we have cost numbers to help customers understand the implications of their request.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • What’s Your Theme Music?

    A few weeks ago, I was at the Small Data SF 2025 Conference in San Francisco. I attended the inaugural event last year and decided to go back again. It’s a great chance to hear people thinking about data and its impact on the world in a different way, recognizing that building lager and larger systems isn’t always possible. Or a good idea. We might find that smaller systems fit well, especially smaller datasets, which can both serve our purposes and create agility. The manifesto of the conference says that “We champion the power of Small Data and smart AI, believing that less is truly more.” There’s a bit more, but that’s the idea.

    The format for the conference is a little different, with 3-5 talks in a row, all on one stage, each about 25 minutes long. These are talks with or without slides, but no live demos, just speaking and expressing a point of view. What I found fun was that each person picked their own music to play as they walked onto stage (or ran/danced in the case of Glauber from Turso). It was a bit of fun, with the DJ letting the music play as the person made their way to the front and were welcomed by the audience. I heard rock, metal, hip hop, and more.

    It’s Friday during the week of the PASS Data Community Summit, and I had the chance to deliver part of the keynote on Wednesday. I’ve done this before, and no one has every asked me if I wanted a pick a piece of music, but it got me thinking. What would I pick?

    For a fun Friday during the holiday season, think about if you were going to give a presentation. Maybe to your team, maybe other groups in the company, or (for some of you) on a conference stage. What music would you choose to accompany your walk into the bright lights? Imagine you get between 10 and 30 seconds.

    Have some fun, and remember this is a professional setting. My first thought was something from the Notorious BIG, but I realized I’d have to walk fast as most of his lyrics wouldn’t be appropriate. I’m not sure, but I lean towards one of these: one, two, three, or four.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.