Unix vs PowerShell

Posted on September 13, 2021 by way0utwest

I saw an article on using awk, sed, and grep on Linux. I used to know how to use those, though I was by no means an expert. However, working with a stream of text with an input and output was a valuable skill I’ve used over and over in my career. There are plenty of times when I’ve needed to handle a long set of text, and my practice with Unix in university helped me a lot. I’ve only lightly needed to use Perl and regex in my career, but I was glad I had some idea of what I was doing.

In the last few years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with PowerShell (PoSh) instead of text-based utilities. While I found some of the design cumbersome and unintuitive, overall, the idea of working with objects instead of a stream of text is really nice.

PowerShell was devised to get around some of the complexities of these utilities. It was built to be an integrated shell, with lots of improvements on the way one might use the utilities above in a bash or Korn shell. While it can take a bit of getting used to, in many ways, I do think it’s superior to the old paradigm of chaining together lots of utilities.

What’s more, it’s fairly easy to enhance PoSh with your own routines, and many vendors have taken advantage of this to provide APIs and interfaces with their tools. Plenty of corporate Ops and IT departments have done the same thing, publishing routines that anyone in their organization can expect to exist and use.

I loved Unix, way more than DOS in most ways when I was in university. If I’d been a decade younger, I might have even evolved into Linux and pursued a career in that environment. These days, with plenty of MS software, including SQL Server, moving to Linux, I’m happy to change to that platform. However with PoSh being available cross platform, I think I’d be looking to use PowerShell as my shell and scripting platform of choice, even on Linux.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 13 Sep 2021

Posted on September 13, 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 focus on the basics, eat well, exercise, get rest.

Easy coping tips for me, for the most part, and something I do often. I make exercise a priority, and often am happy to go to bed early to get rest. I try to eat well, though I sometimes indulge myself too often as food comforts me.

However, with just 3 of us at home, and my wife being a little more careful with eating, I have been tailoring my cooking to be healthier. Shrimp Kabobs a couple nights ago, after a salad for lunch and a couple protein bars to get me through the day. A little yoga on a break from work, and no late nights.

Taking care of my physical self helps the rest of my cope on many, many days.

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The State of Data Growth

Posted on September 11, 2021 by way0utwest

About a decade ago I did some presentations on Filestream and Filetable in SQL Server.  These were technologies that Microsoft added with the idea that lots of data would need to be linked to data in a database, but wasn’t necessarily a good fit for a relational table. At the time, I looked at the growth of data, which was incredible back then. Statistics I had from that time were from the invention of the printing press for the next 500 years, we created 1 EB of data. In the 2011/2012 time frame, we created 2EB each day.

That’s changed. I saw a blog on the story behind the explosive growth of data, which looked at a recent IDC report that showed we created and replicated (a strange term) about 64ZB of data in 2020. With a ZB being 1000 EB, we can see that a decade has brought us multiple orders of magnitude of data growth.

That doesn’t mean we need to store all this data. The report notes that a lot of this is consumption data, which is transferred, but not saved. This means that we do need strong networks, but that most of the time the data is being viewed and not actually stored. That’s certainly the case with things I see on Netflix, where I may end up transferring part of a show multiple times to get through it, usually because I fall asleep.

The estimate for the next 5 years, through 2025, does indicate that we expect to need 200% more storage capacity and that a lot of data storage is going to be at the edge, in devices and server machines, as well as in the core, made up of data centers, cloud and private. While plenty of this data will be outside of databases, and plenty will be in non-relational stores, this does tell me that working in the database business as a career is one that’s going to be in demand for a while.

I’ve enjoyed my career working with data, and I expect to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. I am confident there will always be work for those that know how to work with data in a variety of situations. I also expect a very high demand, and high compensation for those that do it well.

Steve Jones

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Goal Progress for August 2021

Posted on September 10, 2021 by way0utwest

I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

I’m late in putting this out, but here goes.

Current Grade: C-

I left the grade the same, as I’ve made some progress, but not much. Time is running out, I’m getting busy, and I realize I didn’t do a good job really thinking of the workload this year. I’ll review this next month.

Reading

The goal was 4 books (3 non-fiction, 1 tech).  I finished one in early July, and found a few more to add to the list. I haven’t been sure what to read, but I found a few career books. Now I need to find a tech book for the second half of the year.

Here’s the current progress:

No book review, so that’s a failure.

I am enjoying the GE book, as I thought I would work there at one point. It’s interesting, mostly from a business and finance perspective, but I like thinking about this from a business point of view.

Technical Skills

You can read about these goals in my yearly post (linked above), but for now, no change.

That’s not great.

Projects

No real project work here in August. I did speak to a couple user groups, and I guess I helped them move forward with a hybrid meeting.  I’m calling the UG one half done, as one group is dead for now.

  • SQL Saturday Inc – 90%. We own the trademark!
  • Support events: Minor calls here.
  • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation – 50%
  • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual – 50% (more conversations)
  • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 70%
  • SQL Memorial – 90% – I updated this, sadly, as someone passed. I need to move this to straight GitHub Pages and get the custom domain set.
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