Daily Coping 12 Oct 2021

Posted on October 12, 2021 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to find something to be optimistic about, even if life is hard.

I find that life is pretty easy for me. Being in Colorado, we’ve managed the pandemic well, many things have opened, and I live out in the country, so I am not often around groups of people.

I’ve found that the things that are important in my life are starting to move forward a bit. First, I’m back to traveling and speaking. Today I deliver a live talk in Belgium. That’s been a bit part of the last ten years for me, and I’m glad to be getting back to this.

Second, it looks like ski season and volleyball competition will be relatively normal right now. The scheduling and format is what I expect, and that has me excited about the next six months. Even if we have to wear masks as coaches, I’m fine with that. Let’s live some life.

Third, my family is healthy, happy, and growing in their lives, each in their own way.

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Republish: Who’s Smarter? Humans or AI Systems?

Posted on October 11, 2021 by way0utwest

I’m in Belgium today, at the Data Minds Connect conference. As a result, I’m re-running Who’s Smarter? Humans or AI Systems?

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Daily Coping 11 Oct 2021

Posted on October 11, 2021 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to write down three things you can look forward to in the next month.

I’m writing this before I travel, and today I’m in Belgium at the Data Minds Connect conference. The first live conference in nearly two years for me.

I’m looking forward to a lot of things coming up. The first one is SQL Saturday Orlando 2021. This is the first live SQL Saturday taking place since the pandemic hit. While it might be a little early, there are other events starting to move forward and I’m glad this one is taking place. I’ll be traveling back to Orlando at the end of the month.

Second, I am really looking forward to volleyball starting again. Last year was an incredibly long season, about 11 months for me. I was worn out in June when we finished, and I needed a break. However, after a few months off, I’ve started to watch some of my team competing in high school, and I’m ready to start coaching.

Third, I am looking forward to cooler weather. It’s been a long, hot, dry summer in Colorado, and I’m ready to put on some jackets and enjoy fall. I’d love snow, and I’ll likely still wear short pants as often as I can, but I like the changing weather.

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The Last SQL Server Service Pack

Posted on October 8, 2021 by way0utwest

I wrote The Last Service Pack a few years ago, thinking that SQL Server 2016 SP2 might end all large updates. At the time, Microsoft was moving to a Cumulative Update process, with the aim of releasing small patches for each version every couple of months. They’ve done a good job of that, and SQL Server 2017 now has CU 26 with more coming.

With little fanfare, we got Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2016 recently, with a long list of fixes.  Even Pedro Lopes notes this is the final service pack for any version. That means I expect that in the next few years, I’ll start to encounter people working with technology who have no idea what a service pack is or what those are used for.

Visual Studio has “updates”. VS Code and ADS just tell you constantly they need an update, with no deal designation about versions. SSMS has slowed their pace of changes, but the tool really just gets a new version every few months. With Windows we get a large update periodically, but those seem to be called a May 2021 update (or something similar).

I wonder if we are moving towards the era of commercial software being continuous, with updates being released continuously and available for install by customers. Certainly this is the way many of us build software inside organizations, constantly enhancing and fixing code and deploying it out. We often don’t give our customers much choice in whether we deploy changes, and I suspect commercial software is going this way in many instances.

I not-so-fondly remember digging into Service Pack changes and trying to test them against applications, sometimes for weeks before a deployment across an estate. These days, I tend to apply cumulative updates a few weeks late, after ensuring I don’t see many reports of issues on the Internet. I don’t mind keeping up to date, but I don’t like to be the first one to do so.

I don’t know that I care if Service Packs go away. I’ve gotten comfortable with Windows updates, Cumulative updates, and even the random changes in VSCode/ADS that seem to come monthly. I don’t see applications crashing often enough to stop trusting most vendors. Hopefully that feeling continues.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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