I’m off today, in New York helping my daughter get ready for her college graduation and likely trying to pack up an apartment.
While I lightly work, you get to re-read Learning from Exercise.
Hopefully I find some time today to get some.
Category: Editorial
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Multiple Display Productivity
It seems that when I travel to offices these days, it’s standard for most desk setups to have two monitors. I think all the desks at Redgate have a docking station and two monitors for people to use. They also convert to standing desks, which is handy. I have a standing desk that I use regularly, and it’s nice to have that option when I visit an office. At a number of customer sites, I’ve seen similar setups, sometimes with laptop/monitor lifts instead of desks that rise.
Recently I saw a docking station announced that can support four monitors. I wonder how many of you want, need, or use more than two monitors. While there is often a standard in offices, since many of us work part or full-time at home, perhaps you have a different setup. Maybe you have one or two large monitors instead of 3 or 4 smaller ones. I’d certainly be interested to know if any of you have more than 4 monitors.
I run three 24″ monitors on my desk. When I go to an office and use a docking station, I can use my laptop as a third, though the resolution gets a little funny. If I were there for any length of time, I might try to reconfigure the laptop to work with the lid closed. Maybe that’s a chore for the next trip. At home, however, I usually have SQL Server Central and writing tools on one monitor, Chrome with lots of tabs as my main workspace for research and general work, and Outlook/Spotify on a third monitor. That lets me focus on one monitor most of the time glancing at another one for reference or copy/paste work.
I tried four monitors in a 2×2 configuration at one point, but I didn’t like looking up and down. Even now, I often really use two monitors, with side glances at a third one at times. I have been tempted to get 2 larger monitors (27-30″ range), but I’m not sure I would be more productive and not sure it’s worth spending the money for no real benefit I can perceive.
I’ve seen some neat setups in people’s offices. I see some developers using vertical monitors, though I haven’t found that to be ergonomic for me. I seem to have too many long lines of code or text. I see some people using a laptop with one monitor, and I’ve seen some friends who are creative with videos/live streaming that use more than four monitors.
I don’t know I have met anyone that has a gaming chair/monitor setup, but I’m sure someone out there has bought or built something like that. If you have, or you think you’ve got a cool setup, let me know.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
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Are IT Certifications Still Relevant?
I’ve got a few certifications and quite a few more that have expired or aren’t relevant. Does anyone think Windows NT 4.0 or SQL Server 6.5 matter? If you need help in those areas, ask someone else. Unless you have a crazy budget with a willingness to pay a ridiculous hourly rate.
Kamil Nowinski had a recent video discussing why IT certifications are still relevant. He had ten reasons, and if you want to watch the entire show, you’ll hear his reasons and some rationale why he thinks they matter. It’s a good set of reasons: keeping up with tech, practicing learning, demonstrating a commitment to some technology, finding a community of certified colleagues, and more.
In some sense, many of these are tightly coupled, but still worth pointing out. I think for smart, driven, ambitious people, certification is something that you can take advantage of to add to the learning you’re likely already doing: sharpening your saw. That’s an analogy to the craftsman that keeps his/her/their tools ready to go. For us in technology, this is usually our mental acuity with software (or perhaps typing).
For those who aren’t motivated, getting a certification just to add letters after your name devalues the certification for sure. We saw a lot of paper-CNEs (Novell), paper-MCSEs (Microsoft), and paper-CNAs (Cisco) in the 90s. Poor interviewing techniques combined with a glut of certified-but-not capable staffers soured many people on certifications. For good reasons.
However, when you interview someone with a certification, or if you want to get one, pursuing a certification using Kamil’s list means you are driving your knowledge forward in a focused, organized fashion. The certification isn’t the goal, but a step on the way to becoming a more capable technical professional.
I got a couple of certifications in the last few years, and I felt they helped me grow and learn. I didn’t always use all the skills directly, but I learned things that have helped me in my job and I didn’t regret the time spent. I might work on another one in 2024, but time is always in short supply, and I’ve got other things to learn.
Even if I’m not trying to get certified, I continue to learn for many of Kamil’s reasons, just without an examination during my journey.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
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The DBAccountant
One of the things that I’ve found with cloud computing services is that the people involved with managing these resources sometimes get asked to become financial accountants.
I saw an interesting post from SQL Rod asking about this new task as something all of us might need to consider a part of our job in the modern world. He asks if we are Techouncants or Accountechs? This isn’t in the sense of being the Financial DBA trying to manage costs in the cloud, though that is part of his post. It’s more about making smart financial decisions. Certainly, as more workloads move to the cloud, and they are for many of us, we likely need to keep an eye on costs, usage, and tuning.
However, there are other choices. When I had to spec servers, we wanted to get something with room to grow, but not the top-of-the-line most expensive option. I wanted something engineered well for the next few years, and certainly not under-engineered. Usually because adding resources was hard in those days.
Virtualization has made things easier, but often there are still some limits. Still, the goal is matching resources to workload with room to burst if needed. At the same time, are there other choices we can make? Rod asks about choosing the appropriate edition, the HA/DR strategy, tooling, and more. Can we be efficient with our use of money, time, and results, trying to neither overengineer nor under-engineer?
The whole post has a lot of “it depends” in it, as the decisions on what you should choose are something you have to think about and arrive at a decision that balances costs with other factors. It can be clearer often to choose one thing over another, but it’s not always crystal clear which choice is better. I like his hardware analogy in the post. I’m not a fan of just throwing hardware at a situation, but in some cases, that’s the best solution.
The cloud makes it easier to see where costs are. As a Redgate customer put it recently, “tuning queries becomes more important in the cloud as we can see exactly what each one costs.” That can be true for your SQL Server VMs, but it’s often not seen as important when the costs are a one-time spend for your hardware. However, Jeff Moden might argue that you should be tuning queries even without chargebacks or a cloud bill. It will save time for your users, which is always valuable. I agree, since I think we have no shortage of work and time is our most valuable resource. Save it when you can for the most people.
That often means a big part of being a DBAccountant is being able to show, lead, or somehow get others to write better code early. Ensure everyone (or automated tests) knows how to view execution plans, learns to use them, and tries to write more efficient code the first time.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
