Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Jump In

    The SQL Server community is amazing. We help, share, bond, and care for each other in a way that is very rare for a large, disparate set of technical professionals. I see and hear validation of this constantly from people that participate in their first SQL Saturday and are amazed by the experience.

    I think one of the amazing things about the #SQLFamily is that we do jump in and help each other. I rarely see the RTFM answers to questions, or ganging up by multiple people to pick on someone’s ignorance. In fact, I see the opposite. Most often the SQL community calls out and refuses to tolerate unprofessional behavior.

    This seems to be the prevailing view of so many in the community, and I’m not surprised to see John Morehouse call for even more people to jump in and help out. I certainly see plenty of people offering to support or mentor others that are new to writing or speaking, and I think we can do even more.

    All of you can share your knowledge. Whether through speaking, writing, even just providing more comments and thoughts on what others do. Many of you have lots of experience and thoughts that can help your colleagues get better at their jobs. Whether inside of your company, at events, user groups, or just with a note posted to a random SQL Server blog on the internet. Jump in, be polite and professional, and make someone else a better SQL Server professional.

    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. feed

     

  • Data or Experience

    Data Driven

    Listen to the data.

    There are any number of phrases that implore us to use bits and bytes, pieces of information that lead us to better decisions. However, can the data ensure we make the best decisions? Do the models we use get better and better over time? It’s hard to tell.

    This has certainly been debated in the wake of Moneyball, the book that ocuses on the use of data over experience to drive decisions for baseball teams. The Oakland As were the first team to do this, without winning a championship, but the Boston Red Sox also followed the formula and won three championships in the last eleven years.

    However they’ve also had some abysmal years, including the current one. Does that mean that the principles of data driven decisions work, don’t work, or something in between? Personally, I think that the ideas of predictive analytics does work, but it’s not magic. It’s also not a guarantee of reaching some level of performance.

    In sports there’s a strong human element involved. While many players do perform at a similar level from one year to the next (slightly higher or lower), there are also times when a player dramatically diverges from the past. There’s also the notion that a sports team is a very small sample size for statistical analysis. Trends tend to be easier to predict when there are thousands of people’s behavior involved.

    There’s also some variance from transaction to transaction. Even in retail, where I might be able to predict today’s sales fairly accurately, I couldn’t necessarily determine the volume of sales for a particular product or the total on any transaction. Statistics are generated over time, and they’ll be accurate over time as well. Just understand that in the more a human is involved and the more detailed your granularity, the more actual results might deviate from your predictions.

    Even the card counters in Bringing Down the House, for all the millions they earned, still expected to lose some hands, and occasionally some big ones. Keep that in mind when making data driven decisions.

    Steve Jones

     

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • Trust People

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 6, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is away on vacation.

    I saw an article recently with a great title: Put your trust in systems, not in genius. It is a great read, and starts out by talking about the Gauls and their sacking of Rome in 4BC with a superior army. However by 200 years later, the Roman army was the strongest in the ancient world. How did this happen? Many people believe it was the creation of a set of processes, management, and training that used standards and synergies to achieve greatness.

    Many companies today try to implement standards, and strong management of their staffs, but they don’t achieve greatness. Why not?

    I think it is because we have failed to grasp the important fact that building a system, a set of processes and procedures and unleashing managers to enforce the rules is not the important part. The really, really important thing is using the thoughts and ideas, the brain power of the individuals to evolve and adapt the procedures to work better. We too often don’t “trust” our individual knowledge workers to make good decisions.

    We have to hold people accountable for results, for building better systems, and then let them bend rules, change procedures where it counts. Most people want to do a good job. If we give them the responsibility to do so, I think most people will rise to the challenge.

    Steve Jones

  • Data Loss or Downtime

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 7, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I was watching Kimberly Tripp of SQL Skills talk recently about VLDB disasters and how to recover from them. One of the first things she said in the session was getting a damaged database back online, even without all of the data, was important. Often her clients need to keep working, and it is important that they get the system back online, even without all the data. This allows business applications and business people to get back to work.

    That is interesting. I had always thought of my production OLTP databases as needing to be online, but also needing all the critical data. After Mrs. Tripp’s talk, I had to rethink that a bit and consider that a little data loss might be acceptable.

    To me this is a topic that is worth understanding. At the very least, it will help you make decisions in the event of some disaster for how you will proceed. So for this Friday’s poll:

    What is more important to you: downtime or data loss?

    My feeling is that most of the people would really rather have the database online, even without all the data so they can continue to work. I realized that most of the time, getting the site back up, having lookup and other types of ancillary data (like products, prices, etc), was the most important thing. Recovering other data such as older orders, was secondary.

    Once the database is up, you can then work on getting other data back and merging it into the production system.

    Let us know what you think this Friday and what’s more important to your business (and why).

    Steve Jones