Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Looking Back

    Someone sent me this post on 40 years of programming. It’s a read that laments a few things and complains about many others. Most of the thoughts are opinions, and as such, you may or may not see validity in them. I suspect most of you, like me, see some things are mostly true and some as just false. Since I’ve been in this business for nearly 30 years, many of the comments bring back memories and thoughts about my career as well.

    One of the things I do lament is the declining quality of documentation. I’ve seen the volume and detail decline over the years. I wouldn’t want to go back to paper, but I would like to see better examples and more complete examination of the ins and outs of the various functions and features. Far too often I find that there are examples, explanations, or behaviors that are missing. I see the same thing in blogs and articles, which often leap and skip steps in their race to publish.

    Focus and detail on a specific topic has been forgotten by too many. Even understanding the way your code works, or the ways the dependencies work has been lost. As more and more people move to using NuGet and pulling down packages, I find too often that many developers don’t quite understand how their systems work. The divide between those that practice DevOps well and those that just release code faster continues to grow. Few learn from their efforts and produce smoother software development pipelines. Most release code faster, losing track of which versions and dependencies that are required.

    I still see projects from GitHub and other sources that lack explanations of how to actually compile and setup the project. It seems far too many developers half release software, expecting others to spend time learning what works and what doesn’t. What versions were used, and might be needed again. Maybe in some places the software evolves so quickly, adopting new methodologies and technologies constantly, that developers never need to truly understand the system. They just get things working and then change them.

    Maybe that’s why so many people want to rewrite and reproduce software rather than using some existing project and improving on it.

    The one thing I do wish was in all languages is a standard way of handling data types and comparing them. I constantly struggle with = and == when I move away from SQL. The comparisons in PoSh make no sense, and I regularly get errors from > until I change to -gt. It seems plenty of language designers want to make their own creation and cause divergence for no good reason. I do wish SQL had implemented == for comparisons, or that they would in the future.

    As I look back, some things in computer science haven’t really changed at all. Speed and scales have grown, but many concepts remain the same. However, in other ways, I think we’ve come so far, building amazing systems that are interconnected in ways that we might never have imagined a decade ago, much less 30 years ago.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • SSMS is Free

    Really, Management Studio (SSMS) is free as in beer. Go download it today.

    I got a note from a reader recently that was complaining about SSMS and the lack of MDI support. This individual mentioned that they would undock windows (something I never do) and if they minimzed the parent, the child windows all disappeared. I  wondered if there were still issues with SSMS, so I fired up my version, undocked some windows and played around. Things worked as I expected, and every window was independent of the others. I had no issues working, though I did find I’d forget on which monitor a particular child window would appear.

    Last year (2016) we saw SSMS get released as a separate download for SQL Server. The tool has it’s own release cycle, and we saw new updates every other month. As this development team at Microsoft got up to speed with the process and began improving and changing the product, we saw some rough release cycles, but things stabilized a bit late last year. The move to the Visual Studio 2017 shell with v17.x was nice, and I’ve found the latest version to be very stable and easy to use.

    After working with Enterprise Manager in my career, then moving to Management Studio and seeing the product languish over the years as SQL Server grew, I am pleased with the direction of SSMS. The changelog is quite impressive, and I expect more things to be fixed and improved in the future. The team is more responsive, and while they won’t fix everything I (or you) want, they are making progress.

    The new SSMS is not tied to any version of SQL Server. You can use it with SQL Server 2008 and later (though there are OS requirements). It will work with SQL 2000+, though there may be some issues. If you can, I’d say abandon whatever SSMS version you’re using and get the latest 17.1 release. It works well, is stable, and has lots of fixes for previous issues. Plus, you won’t need to apply those old 2008/2012/2014 patches to your workstation. Just update SSMS on your schedule.

    SSMS is free, and while some of us have known this for awhile, I regularly meet people still using the version that came with 2008, R2, 2012, etc. Go download the latest bits today. This is the easiest SQL Server upgrade to justify.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Digital Twin

    The world is changing quickly, and it’s becoming incredibly personalized thanks to digital technologies. I saw a fascinating video from GE on digital twins. These are digital representations of their products, using specific data (sensor, visual, weather, settings, etc.) to build a model of a specific piece of equipment. This model runs on a platform and constantly analyzes new data to evaluate and predict the performance of the system. With equipment like jet engines, power plants, and more, a tiny increase in efficiency can translate into incredible cost savings or revenue increases.

    The idea of using digital twins is taking hold in other fields, and I expect that we’ll continue to see all sorts of digital representations and models of real world items. We are even starting to see this in medicine, with personalized treatments for various diseases, including cancer. By using more data, and powerful computing capabilities, we can tailor our treatment to the individual and their particular ailment.

    This personalization has an annoying side as well, after all many of us have experienced more targeted advertisements and annoying uses of our personal information, however much of that is crude, and lacking in sophistication. Perhaps if the models using data about me would be less annoying if companies didn’t try to sell me a laptop a week after I’ve purchased one, or show me sales on products when I’m looking at SQL Server articles.

    I’m amazed and hopeful that our computing systems will evolve, with more talented data scientists blending their knowledge in some problem domain with powerful computing capabilities and lots of data. I expect that some of the challenges we face with our aging infrastructures and physical systems will be helped by extensive data and powerful machine learning models specific to an instance.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Getting Close to the 2017 RTM

    I still can’t believe that we’ll have a new version of SQL Server this year. After speaking at so many events last year, talking about the new features of SQL Server 2016, it seems crazy that there’s a new version coming out a year later. Welcome to the new world of DevOps, fast engineering processes, and the increasing pace of software releases from vendors. We can debate the wisdom or value of this, and you might not like it, but it’s certainly the reality of today.

    The first Release Candidate (RC) for SQL Server 2017 is available this week. The big change for RC1 is that we can now use Active Directory authentication on Linux, and we get SSIS on Linux. There are a few other items, but these are the big ones. I guess SSIS scale out is a big deal for some people as their data load times increase, but I’d think that is a relatively small number of people. I’d also be wary of having clustering support for my ETL workloads, all of which haven’t been designed for that environment. I would see this feature as being more important and valuable over time. For now, let the SSIS gurus develop some patterns and practices that make sense for us to follow.

    There are other new features in SQL Server 2017, and I’d urge you to play with them a bit. Upgrades are always tricky to justify for me, as I’m sure they are for you. If you don’t know how the new features work, or how they might apply to your systems, how can you decide what to do?

    I tend to favor sticking with what works for older systems and moving to new versions for newer systems. Your view might vary, and certainly unless you want to setup SQL Server instances on Linux, I’m not sure 2017 offers a lot over 2016. In fact, I’d accelerate any SQL 2016 instance installations I could to avoid being trapped with SQL 2017 licenses and the chance that price or licensing terms will change. If there were features that made significant advances for my current system, I’d certainly look at SQL Server 2017.

    Since I tend to only move to newer versions when there is a good reason or a new install is being performed, I like the rapid release cadence. With the deployment and testing in Azure, it seems to me the quality of SQL Server keeps increasing, and the rapid releases allow new changes to come out sooner rather than later. With a version every 18 months (my guess at the new pace), I can adopt new features relatively quickly if I think they are beneficial.

    That being said, SQLServerCentral still runs on SQL Server 2008. It works, and we really just would like a core database engine. I do find it strange to work on the 2008 version of T-SQL as some of the data analysis I try to do is harder to write. I’d really like to upgrade and hopefully we’ll make a good enough case to try and move to SQL 2017 late this year or next. Maybe then we can get the chance to play with some graph capabilities and add them to SQLServerCentral, comparing them to good old relational queries in real time.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.