Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Mechanical Turk

    The original Mechanical Turk
    The original Mechanical Turk

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 17, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    I stumbled across Amazon’sMechanical Turk while helping search for Jim Gray. As a side note, Jim is still missing and presumed dead after an exhaustive search by the Coast Guard and many of Jim’s friends.

    The Mechanical Turk is based on the mechanical chess playing machine created in the late 1800s. It turned out to be a fake, with a human inside, and that is what Amazon has built. They have a way for you to distribute a workload and let humans work on the problem, or a very small piece of the problem. Similar to a super computer, but this process uses humans for things that artificial intelligence can’t handle.

    The basic idea is you create some task, for example one of the items I looked at was reviewing a list of vendor names associated with a contract for the city of Tulsa. It’s a data task that might not be easy to implement in something like SSIS, but a human can easily complete it. And get paid!

    Maybe not much, in this case $0.02 per item, but it’s a good way to distribute the workload.

    If you can find someone to work on the task. I guess if you wanted to fund a book habit at Amazon, it might be worth taking a few minutes here and there to look through data tasks and earn some money.

    I completed two and earned myself $.07 🙂

  • Is Computer Science Dead?

    I enjoyed studying Computer Science in school.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    There are less people entering Computer Science in colleges and less people interested in traditional computer science practices. There’s concern among adademians and one questions: “Is Computer Science Dead?”

    I heard something similar from my brother-in-law about 8 years ago. At the time he was a mail admin for a large company in Texas, running multiple mail servers handling somewhere in the 50,000 account range. At the time, that stressed a lot of the mail servers out there and it was a challenging job. But he worried about advances in automation and better software and thought that sysadmins would be mostly outdated in the next 5 years.

    It’s 8 years later and I see DBAs and even SMS guys finding work in companies with less than 100 employees. So much for automation.

    I took computer classes in high school in the early 80s and spent 2 years in a Comp Sci degree and two additional years in computer engineering and while I haven’t done a lot of programming, I’ve written enough software and been involved with developers to know that most of the fundamentals I learned with BASIC and Pascal still apply. Some of the C techniques involved with optimizing code and being very structured in your development still apply today in .NET, Ruby on Rails, or LISP. Even LISP, which I’ve never used outside of a academic world, still taught me how to program better.

    Because it taught me to think about computing. And algorithms, and how things are processed.

    I think CompSci is still a good major, as good as any other. I also think that we should require C programming to incoming students, force them to work with memory, understand pointers, solve the Tower of Hanoi, and other things without all the benefits you get from frameworks like .NET and J2EE. I don’t believe that much has changed in computer programming in 30 years. We have Procedural and OOP programming and the concepts in either can be applied to any environment. Maybe you could learn relational logic and SQL on top of that, but everything else is new ways of combining these old techniques.

    All the rest is just syntax.

  • Vendor Selection

    salesman
    If only salesman were this cute and cuddly.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 29, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    How you you pick a vendor for a product?

    Here’s how I’ve seen it work at some companies. A contract is coming up for renewal or a new need arises and some IT guys are asked to make a recommendation. So being good professionals, you do some research, download some evals, run some tests, and then try to pick the product that works best for you. “Best” is hard to define since the product needs to do a good job, meaning meet the goals set for it, but also be something you want to administer. You write this up and send it to your boss.

    Then about half the time, the product you hated gets selected. Even if you gave it a bad review or thought it couldn’t do the job. So why is that?

    My guess is that often someone played golf with someone else, or takes them to dinner or other entertainment and the decision maker makes the decision that’s best for them personally, not necessarily the company. I hate to be so cynical, but I see it happen over and over.

    I could be wrong and maybe one of these strategies is in place. Maybe someone is making a more strategic long term decision that it appears to be from the perspective of the IT worker. I’d like to think so, but I see so many other decisions made for the short term and not necessarily for the benefit of the company.

    Choosing vendors to be partners is hard, especially since they vendors are trying to sell software and make their numbers, not necessarily be a great partner for your business. And it can get worse if you are not a large customer. I have friends in the sales side of software and they readily admit that the smaller customers suffer since they just don’t produce enough revenue over time to receive the custom support they’ve often been promised during the sales cycle.

    I’m very much a believer in buy software and then maintain it yourself. And I think you can do this with Microsoft and an ERP package like SAP as well as you can with an Open Source package.

  • The Maintenance Poll

    What’s your maintenance window like when you repair your systems?

    Part of working in Information Technology is working during off hours. In one company we had a standing maintenance window every Friday night. It was annoying for the family, but it did build a nice bond among the production staff during our many Friday night dinners together. Another company allowed maintenance only from midnight Saturday to 6am Sunday, once a quarter. Those restrictions, while annoying, certainly taught us to prepare and test everything in advance.

    The systems we build and support are often in use during the business day by our companies and clients. That usually means that patches or changes to the applications take place in off hours, and that means the IT staff is used to working at night and on weekends to make changes. This Friday I’m wondering what that means for the SQL Server community.

    What type of maintenance windows do you typically operate under?

    Do you have regular maintenance scheduled? When you patch systems or make changes, how does that impact your schedule during the week? Do you get any comp time or flexible scheduling to accommodate patches?

    It’s interesting right now with SQLServeCentral. Since most of the staff at Red Gate operates on GMT and most of the audience is in one of the US timezones, it’s preferable for changes to the systems to be made early in the morning in Cambridge. An 9-10am change window occurs at 4am EST/1am PST, and a relatively small amount of our audience is affected. These changes also mean that there are plenty of people in the office to respond if there are issues.

    In most companies I’ve worked in, we had limited change windows, and restrictions at different times of the year, but overall we had regular maintenance scheduled and available to allow us to maintain our systems and allow staff to plan for work during off-hours, with some type of flexible time for employees stuck working after hours. Let us know today if that’s the case at your job.

    Steve Jones

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