Voice of the DBA

Category: Uncategorized

  • Do You Have Big Data?

    Data sizes are always growing. Stats on world data are astounding, as are the stats many of us experience in our lives. Plenty of us have moved from MB management to GBs, and I see plenty of people dealing with TB storage at home. Most of that data is likely from images and video, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find some people capturing lots of IoT and other random data about their lives.

    As data professionals, likely we don’t quite have the explosion of data inside our organizations, but we certainly do have increasing database sizes. I see this with customers all the time, often with continued or expanded collection of data and no archival plans. The number of customers with > 1TB databases increases every year.

    Overall data volumes are growing at a faster rate than our growth in processing capabilities. That is nothing new, as we’ve always collected more data than we can easily process. Even if you avoid image, video, and audio data, likely you have more CSVs, extracts, and export files than you know what to do with. Maintaining this data is hard, and dealing with all the associated systems is a challenge.

    I wonder today how many people think you have big data issues. No matter whether you deal with GBs, TBs, or something larger, do you feel that managing all your data is a big part of someone’s job? Can you analyze all your data, at least at the rate your customers would like? Can you keep up with queries and extracts?

    This article talks about some of the challenges, and how the problems with big data are going to to continue to plague us for some time. Does the article resonate with you? Or perhaps you feel that you have everything under control. I’d be curious in either case. Leave me a comment and let me know.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Building Better Software for Everyone

    When I first started to use the Internet, everything was text. We used Archie and Gopher, crawling through Usenet lists, with most everything in text format. When the WWW gained popularity with Netscape and visual browsing, this was just a new way of getting information for me. It made sense, and seemed easy.

    These days, using the WWW is something many of us do without a second thought, browsing on mobile devices as well as large computer screens. Many of us have become used to transacting business and using software as a tool throughout much of our lives. However, that’s not easy for many people, including lots of those with some sort of disability. To them, much of the content available seems disjointed and disconnected.

    Not too long ago the US Supreme Court let a ruling stand that notes the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to online content. Plenty of web developers and designers might decry the additional work they may have to undertake to comply, and certainly lots of companies would rather not spend any resources, or few, in this area. However, this is something that has started to matter more to me over time.

    I’m getting older. At 50+, my eyes and ears don’t work that well. I find myself struggling at times to consume the information on a screen. More than once I’ve gotten annoyed with the text on the screen and tried to zoom in, only to have everything get larger, requiring me to scroll left and right to read something. What happened to the reflow of text on the WWW when we zoom in?

    There are ways to change font sizes, and I find myself taking advantage of them more and more. However, there are many people with disabilities that are harder to overcome and they expect that websites and apps have accessibility features. I’ve seen no shortage of complaints that too many software designers are highly connected, physically capable 20 and 30 year olds, who design for themselves, not for a wider audience with varying needs.

    I am trying to do better. I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, and I know that some of the content on SQLServerCentral isn’t as accessible as it could be. When I find things pointed out, I work to change them, and I also am trying to do better with images and media content to be more compliant. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate more and more that my work gets used by many people, and the way they interact with the computer isn’t the same as mine. Accommodating them just seems like the right thing to try to do.

    Steve Jones

  • The Build Book of News

    Every year Microsoft has held the Build conference for developers. I’ve been lucky enough to go a few times, and I was hoping to get the chance to attend again. With the pandemic, the entire event went virtual, and was held across 48 continuous hours. I was slightly disappointed as a few sessions I wanted to see were early in the morning or late at night, but I am sure most of these will be available on demand later, so I can watch them if I wish.

    One of the things Microsoft has done is produce a Build Book of News, a 55 page PDF book of all their announcements and changes. You can download it from Paul Andrew’s blog, or you can look at the announcements online at Microsoft News.

    I randomly watched Build on and off this past week, having some of the sessions in the background while doing other things. There certainly were some interesting sections, though not a lot of data platform focus, but I found a few items that you might like.

    We’re all remote now, or the majority of us are, and I can see that remote tools are
    important. I know there has been some remote code work in Visual Studio in the past, but I didn’t think many people would use it. Now in watching some of the remote code demos, I think these tools might be interesting, especially when a few people are trying to debug a crisis situation. Being able to see the code on my own machine, and seeing what others might change or think is a better (or worse) solution could be very helpful.

    The mobile GitHub tools for review are getting better, and that’s good. Since it’s likely more of us might be in different locations, on different schedules, the ability to approve a PR could prove really helpful. Codespaces are especially interesting. Maybe not so much for databases, but maybe. I wonder if we could easily get data provisioning in here.

    Azure CosmosDB is still something I want to play with, though I’ve been hesitant to set up a db because of cost. Serverless CosmosDB might get me to try something. I have no real excuse since they’re an emulator, so maybe not. I wonder how many of you might try CosmosDB out. There are also announcements about PostgreSQL and MySQL on as PaaS services getting feature parity with SQL Server in many ways.

    Lots of Synapse changes, which might be of interest to those of you with larger warehouses and looking to take advantage of the cloud offering. Quite a few AI changes as well, with Bots, speech, ML, and more. I especially liked the keynote on AI, which I think was interesting. It provides some vision of what could be possible.

    Tons of developer sessions, and I’d suggest that you browse or search the sessions to see what interests you. There aren’t a ton on demand as I write this, but likely more will appear this coming week. I hope the Cloud Skills Challenge will also remain up there, as I’d like to spend some time experimenting with services. If you haven’t worked with the Azure services, I might give that a try and get a feel for what’s possible.

    Build is always interesting, and I’m not sure if I love this virtual format, but I’m glad the event was still available and once again I’m impressed with all the work Microsoft is doing to help developers build solutions.

    Steve Jones

  • Live Stairway – Dax and Power BI Lesson 2

    I’ve created my own meeting, since the last one had issues. This is the meeting:

    https://redgate.zoom.us/j/94367190656

    For security purposes, the password is: 0x303237343839 (cast to int)

    This week we’ll be looking at the Stairway to DAX and Power BI Level 2.

    Join me, Thursday, 12noon MDT.