Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Don’t Forget About Financial Skills

    I get a regular email from Quora, with questions that I might be able to answer or might be of interest to me. There are some database questions, some Tesla ones, and others, but recently I caught an interesting one that asked: why are most people broke? To be fair, there are a lot of questions that appear to be trolling, not people seeking answers, but this one caught my eye. This isn’t very data-related, but it is a bit of advice from someone who is getting older.

    As I look towards retirement in the next decade or two, part of my planning is ensuring that finances are in order. Once I stop working or slow down, the economics of my family change, and we need to be thinking forward to ensure that we have enough funds for our daily living. This can vary in different parts of the world, but I’m surprised at how many people don’t really think about covering their daily expenses without a salary.

    There are various strategies in the Quora answer, and you might find one that works for you. The thing I would stress is that most people don’t get much financial advice or skills from their parents or their schooling. If you did, great, but lots of people don’t. In fact, a lot of people who are successful and make a large salary don’t often find themselves well prepared for retirement. Lots of doctors, like athlete superstars, find themselves in too much debt.

    Learning to manage money is a good skill. It’s similar to managing a budget at work, but not the same. I find lots of people managing a corporate budget like it’s their home checkbook, and that’s not right. At the same time, more people manage their home budget like it’s a growing corporation, and that doesn’t always work well either.

    I learned from my parents, who I felt were too stingy with money, but some of that paid off well for me later in life. The things they taught me ended up helping me invest and save for the future. I don’t have any recommendations today as I haven’t had time to vet any sites or advice. I will say my Mom had me read The Richest Man in Babylon when I was in my early teens. While I don’t follow that advice diligently, some of those lessons have stuck with me, and I do some of the things from the book.

    Pay attention to finances, ask questions, do some learning, get advice from people you trust and who are managing their finances well. Like anything we do in tech, you have to work at learning something new to develop the skill that helps you succeed.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Getting More Time from AI

    As I get older, I find that time is the most valuable commodity I have. It’s the one thing that I need more of, but I can’t get it. Even if I find more efficient ways of doing things, it seems there’s an endless list of things at work and on the ranch that need to be done.

    It seems to be the same for most of my friends in other jobs, whether in medicine, law, or any other position; they’re often overloaded with more work than they can get done in a week. Arguably, it’s not all important work, as sometimes we might tackle a task, only to have our boss throw the work away or delay the project. That’s annoying, but I also understand priorities change.

    Mostly, I understand people ask for a lot of things they don’t really need, but because it’s easy to ask. Over time, they may forget about their request or realize they don’t need it anymore. So I tend to do the work I’m asked and then not worry about if it’s really needed.

    However, that’s not what this piece is about. Let’s say that you have a useful AI Assistant that can truly produce better code, faster than you can. You trust the coding agent (under your guidance), and it saves you time. Let’s say that this agent reduces your coding load by 30%. Forget the issues with the agent stealing your joy.

    A number of studies show that the average developer only codes around 2-3 hours a day. Some might say 4, but that’s just 50% of your workday (I hope). If you save 30% of that time, then you’re saving 1:20 a day, 6:40 a week. That’s a nice chunk of change, but what will you do with the time? Or maybe more importantly, what will your boss expect you to do?

    A lot of management might see 30% and expect you to get 30% more coding done (of 40 hours), asking for 12 hours more of work. I see that a lot as management somehow things that developers work 8 hours a day and should get 8 hours worth of code written. When that doesn’t happen, and it never does, they often schedule more meetings to check on your progress. Hence to 2-3 hours worth of actual work.

    The smarter group of managers might think that you could get 5 hours more work done (30% of 3/day), and the really smart group of managers might use that time to improve the coding skills of the staff. That’s more than a 10% allocation of time and if focused, could help developers write more efficient code (especially SQL), improve their secure coding knowledge, and perhaps even tackle some technical debt with refactoring of existing problem areas. Maybe you could learn to better judge AI-produced code.

    I know that many people are skeptical of AI assistance in coding. I think it’s a tricky thing, but even if the AI doesn’t produce production code, but allows me to conduct a lot of quick experiments that can prove out a hypothesis, I think it can help developers become more productive.

    If they learn to use it as a tool and management doesn’t expect it will turn every developer into a 10x (or even 2x) engineer.

    If you had more time, what would you do in your work day?

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • All the Costs of Downtime

    I studied economics in university, which isn’t that close to database work, though I did have to work through linear regression problems by hand. I always enjoyed mathematics, so this wasn’t a hardship. Until I purchased a PC that was capable of letting me do graphs and calculations in PASCAL and BASIC. Then I realized that my enjoyment wasn’t that efficient or useful, and a computer could help me get things done way more efficiently.

    Many of us work on systems that process tremendous amounts of data, something our organizations couldn’t complete without computer hardware, efficiently or not. We just wouldn’t be able to get the work done by hand. That’s the main reason why downtime is such a problem in the modern world; we can’t fall back to manual systems in many cases.

    I ran across an article that discusses some of the large-scale failures in recent history (Heathrow, Delta, NYSE, Royal Bank of Scotland) due to computer system failure. Certainly, there are large financial costs and lost revenue for organizations that suffer these outages. However, there are other costs that are borne by the staffers, which don’t often make the news.

    When it’s “all hands on deck” to solve a problem, other work isn’t being progressed. There is certainly the interruption of Operations people, but often developers get asked questions or pulled into meetings to provide input. That can take them away from their existing work. Apart from the “23 minutes to get their head back in the game,” as noted in the article, can they even focus anymore? Will they be thinking through all the possible causes, and did they actually provide the right information or all the details needed?

    During a crisis, or even after, it is very hard for humans to focus on anything else. Apart from the technical details, IT staffers can have a range of emotions and thoughts. They might have sympathy for customers affected. They might worry they’re at fault and might be blamed (or terminated). They might be thinking about how they should have coded or configured something differently? Should they have tested more or accounted for issues? They might have simple anger at others who didn’t do their job, or frustration at the failure of a piece of hardware.

    Perhaps even more concerning is the load management can place on employees to get things fixed. If people work long hours, how do we ease them back into the flow of all the other daily work? I know I’ve struggled to get people to rotate work with rest as a manager. As an employee, I struggle to even sleep if I am sent home while others are still working. I’ve had to work 100+hour weeks and very quickly we get into survival mode, not productive mode.

    There are lots of costs to downtime apart from the financial impact. If you can’t maintain a stable environment that limits the time employees spend firefighting, you likely aren’t going to survive as an organization. Startups sometimes can do this, but often it’s from a few extremely dedicated employees who make a difference at a smaller scale. And these employees often pay the price in their personal lives with health, relationship, or other issues.

    The article goes on to look at predictive analytics that might help us reduce some of the issues from hardware issues. I think this is likely true, as we’ve seen digital twins that simulate loads on equipment help proactively catch issues.

    What do we do with software? If we don’t write well architected software that handles the load, how do we write an analytical system that can predict failures? This seems like a level of static and dynamic code analysis that we aren’t mature enough to build.

    Heck, even if we could, how hard is for many of you to get queries tuned in a running system? I find too often there isn’t enough effort or enthusiasm from developers, management and others to follow solid tuning advice and change your SQL. Maybe that’s too limited a view.

    Perhaps the AI analysts of the future will become the consultants of the past, whose recommendations often mimic the words of the current staff, but somehow carry more weight. Maybe they’ll get more things done and changed to help us build more robust systems.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Remembering Phil Factor

    One of the most prolific and popular authors at Simple Talk has been Phil Factor. He wrote many pieces on all aspects of database work and has probably written more articles on the Redgate Product Learning site than anyone else. He has entertained, informed, and inspired many database professionals in his many years as an author.

    Phil, aka Andrew, passed away recently. This was a shock to many of us and a sad day.

    Tony Davis introduced me to Phil, whom I always thought of as Andrew, many years ago when I first traveled to Redgate. Tony published a tribute to Andrew on Simple Talk and has many more fond memories of Andrew. If you ever get the chance to meet Tony, ask him for a few.

    Over the years, I’ve had the chance to get to know Andrew better. He, Tony, and I would often go out for lunch when I was in Cambridge. He came to PASS a few times, and he and I had many discussions about technology and ranch life over the years. Andrew lived on a plot of land similar to mine. We both tended to build, fix, and repair things ourselves, and we often discussed our latest projects.

    He also had a love of bluegrass music and wanted to come to Colorado for the Telluride festival. I’m not sure that he ever made it, though I somewhat regret not being more enthusiastic in encouraging him and offering to go with him. That isn’t my style of music, but does it matter?

    As I get older, I appreciate the time I get to chat with friends and family. I cherish the opportunities to spend time with others, however long or short. These are the important things in life: the events and conversations. It’s a sad time as Andrew and a few others I’ve known have passed away in a short period of time, but I hold many happy thoughts of the times we’ve spent together.

    I hope you remember to appreciate the opportunities you have to spend time with others. And in memory of Andrew, flip through his articles and pick one to read today. There are lots of great ones, and some fun ones, like the SQL Limerick.

    Steve Jones

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

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