Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Cloud is good for your career

    SQL Azure
    Learning SQL Azure can be good for your next job interview

    I think most of us know that the world is not really a meritocracy. We know that the value of many things is not necessarily intrinsic to the item; value is based on perception. That’s a large part of the economic theory of supply and demand. The more people want something, the more it should cost.

    I ran across a piece that surveyed some salaries and it shows that people working with cloud platforms are commanding higher salaries, even when the underlying technologies are the same. It seems crazy, but that’s the world we live in. Perceptions drive a lot of things in the world, especially the ones that don’t seem to make sense.

    Should you specialize in cloud technologies? In one sense, the platform is not a lot different than what you might run in your local data center. Virtualized machines, connections and deployments to remote networks, and limited access to the physical hardware. There are subtle differences, and learning about them and working with them, could be good for your next job interview, when the HR person or technology-challenged manager asks you about Azure.

    Part of your career is getting work done, using your skills and talents in a practical and efficient manner. However a larger part of it, IMHO, is the marketing of your efforts and accomplishments. The words you choose, the way you present yourself, these things matter. I would rather be able to talk about SQL Azure as a skill, and then relate that to local Hyper-V installations of SQL Server than the other way around.

    If you are considering new work, or interesting in the way cloud computing might fit into an environment, I’d urge you to take a look at SQL Azure or the Amazon web services. You can get a very low cost account for your own use, and experiment. You might even build a little demo for your next interview that impresses the person who signs the paychecks.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • The Power of Hadoop

     

    Hadoop has certainly become very popular.

    I wrote about Hadoop years ago, when it was a young project from Yahoo. Over the years the framework has evolved to become very important to a number of companies, important enough for Microsoft to make some substantial investments in Hadoop and SQL Server.

    Why use Hadoop? What’s the power of this framework? It’s designed to work with disparate data sets, with structured and unstructured data, from a variety of sources, and perform complex analysis of this data using clusters of inexpensive hardware. In other words, it scales out very nicely.

    There are plenty of large companies using Hadoop, which is why Microsoft made their investment in the technology, but there is an interesting use I ran across from a Utah bank. Their security department is using Hadoop in place of traditional data warehouses on relational platforms to analyze security data and proactively make decisions. That’s pretty cool to me, especially since security departments seem to have smaller budgets than their mandate would suggest.

    I’m not sure how many places I’ve worked where Hadoop would be useful, but I suspect that as we have larger data sets, from more sources and the need to analyze the data before we put it in a data warehouse, more and more of us will end up using Hadoop along with our SQL Servers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • A Break from Databases

    What do you recommend from Oscar season? I'll say The Descendents

    Last weekend I was all alone Sunday night. Monday was a holiday for me, my wife and kids were out of town, and it was too quiet in the house, so I decided to go see a movie. Safe House was my choice, and it was one I enjoyed during a two hour break from life. I don’t go see too many movies a year, outside of the kid-related ones, but this was fun.

    This Sunday the 84th Annual Academy Awards take place, and while I won’t be watching them, it’s always interesting to me to see which movies and people win awards. A winning actor or actress might entice me to go see a future movie that ordinarily wouldn’t capture my interest. It’s always nice to see talented people working their craft, at least to me.

    We tend to work hard in Information Technology, and it’s nice to get a break. With that in mind, I thought we might take a break this Friday from talking about work, and talk about leisure. The poll this week is:

    Which movies from the 2011/2012 Oscar season would you recommend?

    These don’t have to be movies that are up for awards, just anything released from last February until now. What did you like, or what would you recommend the rest of us avoid? Let us know this Friday which films might provide a nice escape from the pressures and stress of reality.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Future Virtual Machines

    Vritualization madness can be very handy

    I recently virtualized my Windows Home Server. I have had multiple boot drive failures, and I was getting tired of reinstalling the product. So I installed VirtualBox, then created a series of virtual disk drives and set my home server back up. It’s built on RAID 1 drives, so I’m hoping that it will last a long time, and even migrate to newer hardware over time.

    On my laptop and desktop, I use VMWare to build test machines, and then use them for various versions of SQL Server in presentations. I can easily make changes in a VM on the desktop, copy the VHD files to my laptop, and then have the same environment ready when I deliver a presentation. Over the last ten years, virtualization has become a fantastic test environment for me and I can’t imagine doing without it. On the server side, I haven’t even noticed the migration of the SQLServerCentral servers from physical hosts to virtual machines, and they have performed very well.

    However in one sense, nothing has changed for me on the server side. Our VMs are over provisioned, to prevent issues with the performance, just as they often were with physical machines. I suspect that is the case with many other virtual SQL Servers out there in production. However I’m not sure it’s a bad way to deploy VMs for a database server, especially with hardware so cheap.

    I ran across a series of reports on the hypervisors of the future, which talks about the changes from the various vendors, and has a large section devoted to desktop hypervisors. It’s an interesting read, though quite a bit of the information is related to open source products. On the Windows 8 front, the Hyper-V changes look good, but I worry that licensing might prevent most of us from taking advantage of the enhancements.

    I find virtualization to be an amazing way to get more work done on a desktop, in a very stable manner. I can test software in a VM and then remove it, or delete the host if the software causes issues. I can also simulate a large amount of hardware with much less effort than in the past. I urge you to try some virtualization software and experiment with the capabilities. Whether you build experience by working with software you can’t install elsewhere, or just learn some of the capabilities of the virtualization software, it will help you at some point in your career. I only expect there to be more and more VM deployment in all companies over the next decade.

    Steve Jones