Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Look Beyond the First Result

     

    I'm not sure Orbitz did anything wrong, but this certainly made me re-examine how I look at results when searching.
    I’m not sure Orbitz did anything wrong, but this certainly made me re-examine how I look at results when searching.

    This story about Orbitz was very interesting in the way metadata about users was affects the results of queries on the Orbitz site. It’s slightly skewed to imply Orbitz was charging OSX users more than Windows users, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, if an OSX user was detected, the order of search results was changed to show more expensive options first. Users were understandably upset, as some of them ended up paying more for services than they might have otherwise.

    However is this a valid way to present the data? From the business side of things, this makes sense. If you identify a trend, you may look to exploit it or incorporate the potential results into your decision making. I could even see some sort of business intelligence system making this decisions automatically, without human intervention. As we build more sophisticated software, using a large set of inputs, I could see exactly this type of thing occurring more frequently.

    Is it fair? Is it moral? Those are tough questions. We often want to go where the data leads us, and while many of our human tendencies don’t make any sense, the data sometimes shows patterns in our behavior. In the end, I’d argue this was a very poor model of the data. All Mac users aren’t looking to spend more money on goods or services just because they might have purchased a more expensive computer. There are likely quite a few other qualifications inputs that should be considered as well.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • The Dark Side

    I went to the Dark Side recently and enjoyed it.
    I went to the Dark Side recently and enjoyed it.

    Recently I was invited to speak at the Rocky Mountain Oracle Training Days. It was part of some cross platform talks that have happened in Denver, with some Oracle professionals coming to our last SQL Saturday in Denver. I was happy to oblige, and ended up spending part of two days at the small conference. I was a little nervous beforehand, unsure of how SQL Server talks might be received at an Oracle event. There’s a fair amount of animosity between the companies and that seems to bleed over to the professionals working on these platforms. I’ve made my share of Oracle jokes in the past, though all in fun.

    It was interesting to sit and talk with some of the Oracle DBAs attending. For the most part, they have the same problems as SQL Server DBAs, and seem to approach things in a similar manner in terms of indexing, tuning SQL and more. They have the same types of problems, with similar solutions, though the details are different. And, of course, the Oracle solutions tend to be more expensive. I did hear about one thing that I wish was a part of SQL Server: mirroring of log files. I haven’t had many issues with log files, but as databases get more critical, this seems like an enhancement to SQL Server that would make sense.

    One of the interesting things I did hear about was from a cross platform DBA who didn’t have a unified directory services structure and struggled with the SQL Server authentication when clients came from non-Windows systems. This person loved the integration of the Microsoft stack, but moving outside of their technology resulted in lots of challenges. This is one of the areas where I think Microsoft has fallen down in the past, in not supporting a variety of clients well. Even today there are issues when you leave the IE browser in some applications.

    It was a good conference, with so many people facing the same types of concerns over limited resources, technology changes, and job security. Most of the attendees just want to learn more, get better at their jobs, and stay employed. I’m glad I had the chance to attend, and hope I get to go back next year.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Early Software

    My first computer as a kid.
    My first computer as a kid.

    I  have no idea what the first software I saw working on a computer system was. I’m sure it was some  basic demo program on a Vic-20, which I convinced my mother to buy for us. I remember learning to program on this machine for a year or so before saving up enough money to get an Apple II system. I purchased a few games, but most of the software that ran on my computer was written by me. Programs to solve chemistry and physics labs, early attempts at making our own Dungeons and Dragons programs and even a baseball statistics program to “replay” games from the past.

    The first real software I saw in a business setting was a construction estimation program that combined a spreadsheet with some basic CRUD application for managing projects. A neighbor had a business and hired me one summer to help him get it running in his office and train his staff to use it. I’m not sure how well it worked, but I remember being amazed at how much effort and paper it reduced for his company.

    Since that time computers have evolved and software has grown tremendously to incorporate many more graphical elements than I imagined as a kid. However those early programs still stick in my mind and I’m sure have influenced the way I view the world today. Dave Winer wrote about early software and how it’s influenced the applications we have today. I do think there are a lot of influential programs, and the wide variety of them, and the different ways people reacted to them, resulted in what we have today. This Friday, I wanted to ask you this:

    What software first inspired you to work with computers.

    What programs changed your career, or perhaps motivated you to work more closely with the data and less with the programs. Is there any software you really enjoy working with? Do you wish you could build something similar? Let us know today.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy. Today there are no podcasts due to various issues, but the podcasts will return on Monday.

  • Fix the Little Things

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    I thought this was a great blog post and it got me to read, even though it’s a topic I know about, have written about, and didn’t think the post would reveal anything amazing: Finding Fragmentation Of An Index And Fixing It. It’s no-nonsense and it lets me know right away that this author intends to help me.

    But I’m somewhat amazed how many fragmentation questions, posts, articles, and more that I still see on a regular basis. Shouldn’t this be a low level feature of SQL Server that just works? In 2008, or I guess SQL 11 now, should there be any reason for a DBA to monitor this and write custom code to ensure that it’s fixed on a regular basis? Should this not be something built into the system?

    I dream about the day of right clicking a table and choosing “defragment.” This wonderful built in utility would then return my table to it’s initial fill factor and clean up all the allocations of extents to ensure that they were contiguous. It would have options I could pull up that would set the minimum and maximum levels of fragmentation I accept, based on server defaults of course, and it would ensure that my tables were kept within those limits. Sure it would be a background process, it would consume CPU cycles and require a good amount of disk space, but those things are relatively cheap.

    Especially when compared with the cost of time for a DBA to manage this process. Even a few hours a year is too much time wasted by DBAs on a task like this.

    It’s not sexy, but there are a lot of DBAs out there that would really appreciate it. As much as I know large sales dominate the market and this isn’t something that reps at Microsoft can point to, it’s the little guys, those DBAs in lots of 1 and 2 person shops, 10 and 20 instance companies, that make the recommendation to upgrade. And if Microsoft spent some time cleaning up little features, making things work better, I bet there would be a lot of recommendations to change versions.

    And, Microsoft, if you deliver small things that work well, along with the big, sexy features that flake or that we don’t understand, you might be surprised how many of us would be looking to upgrade before Service Pack 1.