Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Technical Debt

    I was speaking with one of the development teams at Redgate earlier this year. They were working on a product, and had planned out a few sprints worth of work. Each sprint, called a train, was a couple weeks long, with specific goals and ideas to be implemented. That was all good, but I noticed that there was a sprint in the middle of the list that was devoted to technical debt.

    Technical debt is a strange term. It’s one that many managers don’t understand well, often because the code may work fine. I ran across an interesting piece that looks at what the concept means, with what I think is a good explanation. We get technical debt when we sacrifice maintainability to meet another requirement. The piece also looks at the accumulation of the debt and why it becomes problematic later. Certainly the more debt that piles up, the mode difficult it can be to change code. Since we are almost always going to go back and maintain code, this becomes a problem.

    I think the ideas given to keep technical debt under control are good ones. We should make an effort to clean code as we can, though not make it such a priority that we end up causing more work with constant refactoring. We do need to get work done. However the suggestions given require a good amount of discipline and buy in from management, and I’m glad Redgate tries to keep debt under control. I think our developers like the debt trains as well.

    I thought the idea was pretty cool until I was looking for a feature to be completed and the technical debt train was running that week. I thought about complaining, but I decided to have patience and wait a week. After all, if the debt isn’t kept under control, I might be waiting much longer than a week for some fix or feature next year.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Shrinking the Budget

    Most of us rarely have to build or manage budgets in our organizations, but almost all of us are affected by the budget process. It’s tempting to ignore budgets and just do your job, but sooner or later you might find yourself arguing for more funding for a project, training, or even hardware.

    I ran across a short piece on 10 ways to shrink your IT budget and found it a bit scary. I would bet that many of you have had conversations, or been affected by decisions, that follow some of the advice in the piece. The push for open source, virtualization, hosted (or cloud) migrations, or more can cause stress and anxiety when your job is making sure the servers run without complaints from end users.

    I don’t expect that all of these would be followed in a specific organization, but some of these might be proposed to you. What I would recommend is you understand the reasons why, or why not, you might adopt any of these ideas. Certainly the time lost from retraining people or rewriting code can overwhelm the savings for many years, but even seemingly smaller changes, like changing priorities can affect the way your clients and customers view IT. It seems that sometimes budgets get changed to provide a short term view that technology spending is being managed efficiently, only to find out later we will remove all our savings by undoing a poor decision.

    I’d suggest that you approach budget issues with transparency and honesty. Take a hard look at your costs and determine what items are really needed, and what items aren’t. However, I’d also urge you to carefully consider whether it’s really valuable to save money by not taking care of your staff. While labor is an expensive part of your IT cost, good staff are worth much more than they cost, often by an order of magnitude.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Relational By Default

    I’ve read a few pieces from Vladimir Khorikov and I tend to like the thoughtful way in which he approaches building software. When I saw a link to his SQL v NoSQL databases, I was intrigued to see what his thoughts would be. It’s a good read, though with relatively few comments or debates posted at the time I read the article. I was hoping for more and I encourage you to add your thoughts.

    The main contentions in the piece are that any of the simpler development techniques that we can use with NoSQL databases don’t remove the need for implementing data quality or management features. They just require those features to be implemented by the developer. Specifically the need to deal with multiple schema versions over time, or the requirement we enforce parent child relationships.

    Perhaps that’s not too bad. After all, if we evolve schemas and the code can easily deal with the changes, that’s good. However I think the point about having relational storage when you can, and adding in other stores makes sense. This is what I really believe as well, since we often need to query and combine data, which is something relational stores do very well and very efficiently.

    Ultimately I’m sure we will continue to see arguments about relational and NoSQL models being better or worse for particular problems. I actually welcome the arguments  because there are certainly domains of problems where one system works better than the other, and it’s good to develop some clarity about those particular problems. However there are also likely many situations where multiple platforms can work, and in those cases, we should use what works well for our team.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Private Data

    I think that as we evolve into a more digital world, we really need to modify and enhance the various legal systems around the world to cope with the challenges of digital information. The world changes when vast troves of information can be gathered, indexed, easily maintained, queried, and copied without anyone being aware, or few people understanding how any particular data is used. Data fundamentally is different in the digital world precisely because the costs and barriers to its movement are so low.

    I’ve been concerned with this for a few reasons. One is that I like my personal privacy and would like to ensure that data collected about me and my family is something I have some say in. Or at least some understanding. However as a data professional, I also have concerns about the responsibilities and potentials liabilities of managing data in the future. There’s also the not-so-little concern about employers pressuring employees to deal with data in a way that might conflict with their personal ethics, or even the local laws.

    I’m glad someone at Microsoft is taking a stance, asking the US and EU to recognize the privacy of digital data as a right we have as individuals and corporations. The request asks that governments treat digital data like they treat analog data, serving subpoenas and warrants to the owners of the data, not the custodians. While this isn’t what always happens in the real world, we certainly should have more protections for digital data than we have now.

    I’d like to see governments amend their laws to also exclude IT workers from liability in working with data that they are custodians of. We often don’t make the decisions about what data to gather or how it should be managed and moved. We just implement the decisions, often under coercion from our employers. Liability should rest with those employers, not those the employers have hired.

    I don’t have hope that things will change anytime soon, but I hold out hope they will at some point.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.