Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Release Wednesday

    I’m glad that someone else is adopting Release Wednesdays. I was surprised to see the post from Red Gate, though I shouldn’t have been. I knew we were releasing regularly and some groups were aiming for weekly releases. There was easily a 1 in 7 chance of them choosing Wednesdays, which has a special meaning for me.

    I worked at a startup company where we released every Wednesday. We worked in one week increments and developed an application across a couple years that evolved and morphed to meet differing business needs in the education market. We went from working with digital sales, to including physical products, to subscriptions. Our customers went from individuals to corporations, to departments in corporations, and all along the way we managed front end and database changes in one (or sometimes two) week increments.

    We didn’t practice Agile or Scrum or anything formal. We worked as closely as 10 people could, coordinating and communicating to get features implemented every week. We started releasing on Wednesday nights with the lead developer and myself staying late at the office Wednesday nights (usually with another developer or two for company) for an hour. That was reduced to phone calls where we deployed from home (and fixed problems) in real time. Eventually we built such a well engineered process, with thorough testing, that our deployments were completed in minutes with a few chat messages to verify we’d both finished our tasks.

    We did that for over 18 months with only one or two rollbacks, and without the all night frantic coding sessions to fix issues that I’d experienced elsewhere. It wasn’t simple, but it wasn’t hard. It required preparation, planning, a strong culture of professionalism, and support from our CTO.

    I see the same types of culture at Red Gate, and I’m not surprised by the rapid releases, nor the success we’re having in evolving, updating, and patching our products over time. I’m excited to see how much quicker we can move and how we will continue to build better software, faster. 

    One Wednesday at a time.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Kanban

    With more and more software developers trying to find ways to better build software, we have seen many new methodologies and processes being used for managing workloads, tracking development progress and more. Perhaps one of the most interesting adoptions for companies looking to speed up their development has been the use of kanban boards for tracking work in Agile or Scrum systems. Kanban came about as part of the manufacturing process at Toyota and proved very valuable for them.

    We use kanban boards all over Red Gate, for everything from software development to marketing campaigns, to books we’re publishing. It’s kind of amazing. However I hadn’t thought about using one personally until I saw this piece on LifeHacker (a related piece on visualization as well). It’s hard to know how well this would fit for me to manage my workload at SQLServerCentral. While we use a kanban board for a few tasks, like Stairway Series, I think this would be a bit complex for the variety of tasks I deal with on a regular basis. I suspect I’d need a number of kanban boards, a separate one for each type of work, and then I’d be trying to somehow manage my workload between all of them.

    However I do think that for software development, and for a limited set of tasks that you want to track and organize, kanban is a good way to easily visualize the workload. I also think this could be a good way to manage your career learning. Set a list of things to learn, break them down into tasks (watching videos, reading an article, writing a CTE) and then track your progress across the year.

    Having a visual reminder can be motivating, as long as you can make progress and see work moving through progressions. If not, it can be another source of pressure or stress that you avoid. However it’s an interesting technique that might work well for teams that are focused on a single set of work.

    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.

  • The Devil’s in the Details

    This week I was scanning through a number of SQL Server posts (in between working on April Fool’s Jokes) and a couple of them caught my eye. They dealt with simple subjects, but subjects whose details are important. I’ve often found people have had performance issues in SQL Server because of simple misunderstandings of how the system works, or because not enough weight is given to the impact of small details.
    Kimberly Tripp (of SQLskills) wrote a basic post on parameters, variables, and literals, which would think most programmers would understand. However I realize more and more that lots of people that write code in the world taught themselves. That’s amazing, but it does mean that people have many different holes in their knowledge. What I might consider basic or common knowledge might be something that another person never had been exposed to. In any case, Kimberly does a fantastic job of laying out the differences in these three concepts, how they work side by side, and how the choice can dramatically impact performance of your code. Read this one.
    The other post this week was a fairly simple post on data conversions by Rob Sheldon. Again, precedence and conversions are something I dealt with when writing C code, and you do not want to get things wrong there. However many people might not have the same background and wouldn’t understand by varchar and nvarchar wouldn’t be a basic, simple conversion with little cost. Or why the type of conversion might result in far different results than you expect. Since we often test with one set of data and our application work with a (much) wider set of data, this one is a must read as well.
    There are so many things you should consider when writing code it’s really a constant and regular effort to improve your skills in this business. You won’t learn everything, or learn something every day, but pick things up and practice with them. Learn to build better code, one technique at a time, and cement that knowledge with actual implementation in your work.
    You’ve got at least two new things to look at this week, so pick one and try to ensure your code next week considers these details.
    Steve Jones

  • Large Chunks of Data

    This editorial was originally published on Sept 17, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I saw a post recently where someone talked about trying to get better performance from a report. They were selecting 5mm rows from a table and wanted to see if there was a more efficient way to chunk out this data so that the instance would not report memory errors.

    My first question is what kind of report has 5mm rows of data? That’s just too much data.

    How long can a report be?

    From your experience, talking with people, looking at what they analyze, how big is a report? How much data can you really display on a report and make it useful for users?

    I’m thinking here in terms of the raw data you show. A pivot table can summarize millions of records, but realistically I thin kit becomes hard to examine more than a few hundred data points on a page. Whether they are raw data or aggregates of other data, it seems there’s some limit to what a report should provide.

    After all, that’s why we have drill-down 🙂

    Let us know this Friday what you think; what you have observed? Maybe we’ll  help others to build better reports that are more practical and useful to end users, as well as easier to develop.