Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Benefits

    Still a 1/2 gallon

    One of the ways in which some companies have tried to keep the prices of their products down is by changing the packaging. It used to be that you would buy a half gallon of ice cream or laundry detergent, but now you’ll find that often you are getting slightly less for the same price you used to pay. For the former that might be a nice way of lowering your portions but for the latter that’s just annoying. I find that to be a subtle point of deception by some companies, and it likely will continue into future.

    For those of us that work for a company, we might find a similar erosion in an area that we have come to expect a certain level of benefit. A recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that many companies were lowering the level of benefits that they offer to workers. The costs of those benefits have been rising, and as companies try to keep a certain level of profitability, it seems workers are feeling some of the effects.

    I think most of us expect that our health benefits will cost more in the future, at least under the current state of healthcare in the US. Many of us are also sure that the days of regular bonuses are gone for now, but there are some other subtle benefits that you might not realize are disappearing. Tuition reimbursement is going away at many companies, perhaps with the idea that the education isn’t as valuable to companies as in the past. Charitable donations have declined, and it seems less companies are allowing casual dress or flexible work time. That might not impact the technology groups yet, but it’s a trend that concerns me, and perhaps should concern you. Benefits might become more of an issue in the future, especially as you change jobs.

    It’s not all bad. There are more companies offering gyms to workers, which I think is great, and more companies offer cell phones to employees. That last trend, however, seems to be leading more of a liability than a benefit.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Going Big with SSDs

    Nimbus Data just sold 100TB of SSDs to eBay

    I found a report recently that eBay had implemented 100TB of SSD storage from Nimbus Data for their virtual infrastructure. That’s a huge amount of very fast storage, which definitely helps explain how the eBay auctions seem to run so quickly. Apparently eBay isn’t the only company that’s moving to SSDs for part of their infrastructure as Facebook spent $69million on FusionIO storage.

    SSD storage isn’t cheap, with eBay reporting $25k for a 2.5TB device, which is about 2.5 times the cost of my rough pricing from Dell for a similar HDD device. The SSDs have amazing performance, though I’m not sure what the reliability is compared to HDDs. There are plenty of vendor studies that promise long lasting drives, but I think we’ll have to see what more people report as they deploy these drives over time.

    I’ve never worked in a company similar to eBay or Facebook that had a very large IT budget and could afford to over-spend to achieve high levels of performance. I’ve always had to analyze the price/performance ratios and choose hardware that met our needs, at a reasonable price. However I am glad that companies that need high performance are willing to try new technologies, and hopefully release the results of their investment at some point in the future.

    More and more people are starting to implement SSD drives, but not as their only storage. I find companies using these drives in limited places, as tempdb drives, log drives, or for certain filegroups. The premium paid for these drives means they need to be used where they provide that highest level of performance for the price, which isn’t every place you store data in SQL Server.

    As SQL Server DBAs, we need to learn more about the impact of SSDs in different parts of our systems, plan for them to fail  more often than HDDs for now, and more importantly, consider designing in some type of archiving or partitioning strategy that can tier storage into faster, and slower, sets of data.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Keeping Your Soul

    Is your soul for sale?

    Last year I got into a debate, and an argument, with a friend over the growth of Google and their profits. I took the position that while Google has provided a good service to the world with their search engine and their founders have earned money, they will find it harder and harder to continue to follow the mantra of “do no evil” if they feel they need to continue to grow their profits. Given the recent shutdowns of some of the “good projects” they had embarked upon to make the world a better place, that prediction seems to be coming true.

     

    Building a business is hard, and as shown in the numbers, most don’t succeed. Many do, however, and the vast majority of businesses out in the world today are small ones, with less than a 100 people. However those small businesses don’t account for most of the revenue in the US.  Large businesses do, which isn’t all the unexpected since those large companies do business in areas that are important to most people (energy, oil, banking, etc.).

     

    In the technology world, it seems that we often hear about “the next big thing” disrupting the way the world works and making people rich. The people in these companies are just like you and me; they built a product , caught the eyes of millions, and became a success. That dream has driven so many technology workers to come up with their own idea or go to work on someone else’s idea in a startup.

     

    However the chances of hitting it big are like the chances of hitting the lottery. Those chances are small, though I wouldn’t discourage anyone from pursuing that dream. What I do think, however, is that it’s not worth losing your soul over the chance to make money. I truly believe you can succeed, and make money, while making ethical and moral decisions that respect your customers. You might sacrifice some profit to do so, but in the end, I think that’s a good trade. I would certainly rather make a million dollars ethically than a billion dollars compromising my values.

     

    Steve Jones

     

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Tricky Questions

    What tricky questions have you been asked?

    I suspect that most of us have been on many interviews in our career. Unfortunately today’s technology business doesn’t seem driven towards having decades of employment for individuals at one job, so most of us will have more interviews sometime in the next five to ten years.

    I’ve had many interviews in my career, of all types with many different formats. I’ve had technical interviews with multiple people, tests to take, and interviews by managers that didn’t include a single T-SQL question. I’ve had a lot of success, and much of what has worked for me is a part of my presentation on branding, which you can see at the PASS Summit in 2011.

    With that in mind, I thought this Friday poll might be a good place to help you get prepared for your next interview by asking about the questions that others have been asked. The question this week is:

    What’s an interview question that has thrown you for a loop?

    It’s rare that I’ve actually been surprised by interview questions. I typically prepare for interviews, using a process that has worked for me since I was in college. I research the company, trying to understand what the business is, and if possible, the person that might interview me. I look for blogs or other information written by employees, and any information I can get to prepare for questions about the business or technology used in the company.

    There have been a few times I’ve been thrown by a specific technology question, usually asking for some switch, definition, or other detail that is easily gleaned from some documentation. For those questions, I practice making sure I know where to get the information and use to show that I understand what needs to be done and where to get the answer.

    Let us know today if you have any great questions you get asked, especially if you’ve been asked any of them more than once.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts