Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Visualizing in Space

    One of the really interesting things that we are able to do as developers and DBAs is help find ways to analyze data for our clients and customers. Many of us might not have expertise in the actual areas that are represented by our data, the industry specific knowlege, but those of us that will be the most successful in the future at our jobs will be able to work with the people that have that specific knowledge and need help to implement the analysis.

    That will take some practice. I’d encourage many of you to start playing with some sort of data that you are interested in and try to perform some analysis. Whether it’s useful or just for fun, you will be gaining some skills in both analysis and presentation that will serve you at some point.

    There are so many sets of data available for practice that you can probably find something in an area that’s interesting to you. I don’t know if you could get the cool spatial data set seen in this talk, but there are certainly sports sets available, open data sets from government, movies, entertainment, and more.

    Working with a set of data that intrigues you is a way to enhance the very skills that you’ll want to have to help your employer. Building reports, visualizations, and more is a technique to show value to your current employer. It’s also a great way to showcase your talents on a blog that might just get you an inquiry or interview for an amazing next job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • What We Want and What We’ll Pay For

    I’m sure many of you see surveys that note IT job growth is up 30%. Or that executives want to hire 20% more people. Or that the market dictates that salaries will be going up 12%.

    Those are exciting numbers, and I see them too. However I saw a great post that summed up the fact that those are just quotes, perhaps even desires, but not necessarily realities. This answer notes that what we want and what we’ll pay for are often two different things.

    Many IT executives would like to hire more staff. They know that there’s a backlog in IT that can be reduced with additional staff. They might also believe that hiring more staff increases the chances of talented staff that can produce higher quality work, playing a game of numbers. They also know that newer hardware or software technologies can often produce better results for the organization.

    However whatever their beliefs, they will often be constrained by budgets. There are always going to be other priorities in an organization that compete for additional resources. Sometimes IT will get what they want; sometimes they won’t. Often the end result will be less than they want, but more than other groups would have spent on technology.

    The surveys and quotes we see published, good or bad, aren’t worthless. They’re often a reflection of a best case hope, like so many of the estimates that developers give about their work. The numbers can indicate a trend, but take them with a grain of salt. Apply a little skepticism and treat them like averages. Remember, an average of 50 can come from 49 and 51 or from 1 and 99, both pairs of numbers reflecting different realities. Above all remember that an average or ideal also doesn’t necessarily reflect what you, personally, will experience in your career.

    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. feed

  • Is Skynet Coming?

    That’s the question this week: Is Skynet coming?

    I read a piece recently that noted Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have warned us about artificial intelligence. They have been quoted as this is potentially something that the human race needs to be cognizant of. However, I wonder.

    I know what IBM’s Watson does is amazing, but is it intelligence? Is it anywhere close to sentience? Or is it really just pattern recognition and matching with facts? I think more of the latter, and I’m not sure we’re moving closer to a computer intelligence.

    I guess there are narrowly defined domains where computers seem to be improving their capabilities, but it seems to me that these areas are defined by the programmers and the systems are tailored to a specific ability.

    I do agree with the article that combinations of massive computing power and humans will make fundamental changes in the world. I think many, many jobs are potentially going to be lost and workers dislocated because of the ability of computers to do many jobs that humans perform today. I don’t have any solutions here, but I am glad I work in technology.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • The Evolving DBA

    It’s interesting to think about the role of the DBA and how it might evolve in the future. I regularly see predictions about the DevOps movement, and increasing ability of fewer staff to manage larger scales of systems (more systems or more data). There is also the fundamental way in which larger “cloud” type providers (inside your organization or third parties) can include features or services that reduce the need for DBAs.

    However I ran across a statement that I think certainly provides some view into how the DBA might be affected in the future. The statement was: “The more an organization values its data, the more the DBA is under pressure to provide access to this data.” That includes all the people working with and managing data, whether developers, sysadmins or dedicated DBAs. They must ensure the data is available and useful to clients.

    I’m sure many people unconsciously realize this is their role, but they sometimes get caught up in looking at performance, or normalization, or backups, or some other task as being the highest priority task. In reality, we must continue to ensure backups are available if we need them, and systems perform well, and all the other ancillary tasks, but remember that backups and tuning and everything else are tasks needed in support of making data available for users.

    More and more I really believe that anybody that functions as a data professional, whether that is a small part of their job or all they do, needs to keep this fact in mind. The data is the more important asset we work with and all our efforts need to be geared towards helping our users access in as many ways as possible.

    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