Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Are We Suckers?

    I written about learning to say no. I’ve noted that we must find a balance in life with work. I try to encourage you to work hard, get better at your job, and bring value to your employer. I certainly know there are plenty of employees that coast along in their jobs, doing often less than what I would consider the minimum. I’m hoping that more and more of you are trying to do better.

    However, when I read pieces like this one where a CEO wonders why employees don’t work harder, I get frustrated by managers that don’t seem to understand that work is merely work for many of us. We enjoy it, we want to do well, but it’s just a part of our lives. We have other things in life that we love and are more important than work.

    However I also know there are plenty of you that go the extra mile. You routinely work outside the normal business hours to solve problems, or just deploy changes to system. I’ve been there, and I’ve wondered why I’d bother working from 11pm Sat – 4am Sun for “routine maintenance” if I wasn’t being paid an hourly wage. This week, what do you think about this?

    Are we suckers for working extra hours?

    I know plenty of people enjoy the work, and they rise to the challenge of responding in a crisis. One of the hardest things I had to manage was getting people to go home and rest when faced with an extended crisis. It seems I had no shortage of employees that wanted to work 30, 40 or more hours in a row, and I’d argue to send them home to rest because I’d need them to work tomorrow night.

    I think that we should make an honest effort to give our employers value. We should do the work assigned, perhaps do it better today than yesterday, and be flexible when more work is needed. I also think employers should do the same thing. Extra hours at work should be extra time off. Compensation should relate to to performance, but not hours worked. Sacrifice by employees should be met with sacrifice by employers.

    In other words, just like my balance between work and life, there should be a balance between employers and employees with each side respecting the other.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The Machines are Learning

    One of the technologies that Microsoft is promoting heavily is machine learning. This has rapidly gone from a technology that I heard little about to being in multiple keynotes that I’ve seen at large conferences this year. It almost seems that I can’t go a week without seeing some sort of machine learning article, announcement, or reference.

    How applicable is machine learning for most of us? I’m not sure, but banks have certainly taken advantage of machine learning to reduce their risks associated with fraud and their systems work well. In fact, given the ways in which I travel, I’m amazed that I don’t get more calls about fraud related to my card use. With me in a new state almost every month, on a very irregular schedule, sometimes buying computer supplies far from home, I get called by a bank once or twice a year.

    Across the ten or so calls I’ve gotten in the last few years, only one questioned legitimate purchases. The rest caught fraud on the same day that someone tried to use my card without my knowledge. That’s a very successful rate of both true positives, and a very, very low rate of false positives. I’m impressed.

    If you haven’t played with machine learning, Microsoft has made it easy to give a try in Azure. You don’t even need to put in a credit card to get up and working with machine learning. Whether it’s applicable to your industry or not, you’ll have to decide, but I do think that lots of tedious analysis that humans do now could be better done by a machine.

    At least after one of us humans has configured the algorithms and trained the machine to recognize patterns. And, of course, with one of us technologists periodically tuning the system to work better  and monitoring the analysis as data changes.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The Years of Experience

    I heard Tim Ford say recently that the years of experience don’t matter as much as what you do with them.

    That’s a great quote. It’s also one that goes along with the idea that there is no shortage of people that mistake 5 years at a job for 5 years of experience. It’s highly likely that many people really get 6 months of experience and repeat those same skills for years, because that’s what the job requires. Unless you have a dynamic, changing environment, one that experiments and regularly looks to upgrade systems, it’s hard to get those years of experience without changing jobs.

    That’s a conundrum. Do you want to change jobs to get new experiences and grow? Some people become consultants for this reason. Others regularly look to move on to a new company, sometimes sacrificing benefits, short commutes, or something else to grow their careers. However plenty of people prefer to stick with an organization, whether that’s because loyalty, a great set of coworkers, security, or nature of the work being accomplished. Many people will stick with a job as long as they can.

    In those cases, I do believe that you can still do something with your years and grow experience. Continue to learn, experiment, and suggest changes where they fit. Learn to write the complex T-SQL that’s needed in older SQL Server 2005/2008 systems, but spend a bit of time also learning how Window functions in SQL Server 2012+ run more efficiently. Rebuild reports in PowerBI, and see if your organization can see the benefits of investing in one new thing this year. Even if your company won’t make changes, imagine what you’d do if they ever change their minds.

    Above all, practice your skills. Rewrite old processes and squeeze out more performance. Automate things in your job, whether you use PoSh or VBScript, when you can make gains in productivity, you can create time. Time that’s valuable in helping you learn. Even if you can’t get your code deployed, will will have the satisfaction of improving your skills, and knowing you can make a difference if you ever get the chance.

    I realize many of you are busy. I realize that learning about R or Kimball data warehousing might be seem to be pointless because your organization will never use the technology. I get it, and I don’t disagree. However I hope to inspire you to try to enjoy technology. Jump on Twitter with the #sqlfamily and gain some motivation with what others are doing, or have them cheer you on as you learn. You might be surprised what you can do with your years when you find something you enjoy and get support from others that share your excitement about computing.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The $90,000 Laptop

    A hospital got the opportunity to pay $90k for a lost laptop.

    There’s no excuse for this. If you have a Windows laptop, enable bitlocker today. If you have OSX, setup FileVault. If you’re on Linux, choose dm_crypt or something else. Go ahead, get that setup, save off your keys as a backup, and come back. I’ll wait.

    Now, don’t you feel better? I’m sure you do, and you are somewhat more protected from the random theft, misplacement, or loss of your laptop. All of those things happen regularly. Not to each of us, or many of us, but as the collective set of developers and DBAs around the world, we lose laptops regularly.

    Certainly some of us have precautions like never carrying data around. That’s good, and I’d recommend that. For those that need to develop on the go, they might have a curated set of test data we can use for development. That’s fine. We should make an investment in building test data and have that data used for unit, integration, and system testing.

    We should have investments in ensuring that our systems can not only be encrypted, including encryption of backups and networks, but that we can restore those systems in disasters. Make the investment in ensuring recovery, and everyone is more likely to accept encryption. We need to invest in a process for managing keys, revoking them, and re-issuing them. We need to be sure we can upgrade encryption algorithms over time. What is secure today might be easily broken tomorrow.

    I’d urge you to make all those investments, but until you do, at the very least, encrypt your laptops and desktops. While any random theft could result in a lost laptop, it’s not unheard of for anyone walking through your office to pilfer a drive lying around, or even one inside a desktop.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.