Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Continuous Delivery In Real Life

    I’ve been writing and presenting on Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) for a few years now. In that time I’ve encountered a lot of excitement and a good deal of skepticism as well. Many people want to know more and more, who is actually using this stuff? It’s nice to talk about Spotify and Netflix, but their problem domain, resources, and above all, youth, are something few organizations deal with.

    What about Microsoft? They’re a large organization, fairly mature (now 40 years old), and have their own levels of bureaucracy to manage. However they’re fundamentally changed the way they perform development across the last decade and a half. Starting in the beginning of this century, they moved to make secure coding a priority. In the last few years, they’ve also started to truly speed up their development process with CI and CD, culminating (now) with an extremely quick Windows 10 development pipeline.

    I saw a piece noting Microsoft is releasing almost daily builds of the new OS. That’s an amazing feat of engineering, and certainly one that shows you can develop an efficient software pipeline. While I’m sure that individual engineers don’t necessarily have their code released daily, that’s not the point. The point is that changes can be checked into version control (please, please do this), tested, and then made available for release.

    You can build software this quickly, too, though not in a day. Probably not in a month. I would guess it will take a year or two for many organizations to assemble the processes, change a bit of culture, and get used to building your application daily. Above all, it will take time for you to build unit tests and get them automated. You’ll have issues along the way, and it will be painful, but isn’t releasing software painful for most groups right now?

    A year or two sounds like a long time, but really it isn’t. Look back a year at your company and job? How much have your process changed? If it isn’t a lot, doesn’t that feel like you could have done something to improve the way you release software? Is there the possibility of making a smoother process that makes it easier to get enhancements to customers? I’m sure there is, and I hope you think about starting to assemble your own software pipeline today with CI and CD. Take baby steps, and slowly make changes to automate and standardize your deployment process.

    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. feed

  • 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