Daily Coping 12 Jul 2021

Posted on July 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 look for something positive in a difficult situation.

My life is mostly great, and I feel strange complaining or getting upset about things. In general, my difficult situations are merely uncomfortable or annoying, and I try hard to remember that.

Difficulties are relative, and for me, I had a tough time with a bunch of things breaking at home. During a busy time, with lots of other commitments, I needed to stop and rebuild a hub on a trailer. It gets used every day, and I had a choice between rebuilding the exploded one, or adding some supports and bracing to a 2nd trailer. Neither was quick.

I was a little annoyed when I went out to see this, but then stopped to revisit how I looked at the situation. No one did this on purpose, it’s the way things go in the real world, and I know how to do this. While I was grumpy with a few people as I started, I managed to take a positive outlook on this as I got into it.

I got to practice a few skills:

  • quickly removing the old hub bearing race with a specialized tool
  • grinding down the axle where it was slightly deformed
  • taking a break to get a new set of bearings
  • using my experience to reassemble the wheel in about 40 minutes
  • Not bending (too much) the hub cover tapping it back on.

All in all not what I wanted for the day, but it was fine. I got a few other things done, and got to teach a few people how to prevent this in the future.

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RIP Brian Moran

Posted on July 10, 2021 by way0utwest

When someone older than you dies, it’s sad, though I feel that I can cope. I hold memories dear, I appreciate the time I had with an individual, and I hope I can live as long as they walked the Earth.

If someone younger dies, it’s truly shocking. After being stunned, I often stop and appreciate where I am in life, and that I’m still here.  A phrase runs through my head:

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I’m not a religious person, but that phrase sticks with me. I am lucky to be where I am. I’m lucky to have had good fortune, and that my bad fortune hasn’t been catastrophic.

Today I got a note from a friend. He told me that Brian Moran (t, st, mvp, li)  had passed away. Brian was a wonderful man, someone I’ve known close to 20 years. We worked in the same field, we were fellow speakers at events, and we’ve had numerous phone calls at times trying to find ways to work together in business. He was a big part of the PASS organization, of supporting SQL Saturdays, and helping grow the SQL community larger and stronger.

He is one of maybe a few dozen people in my professional life whose partner I’ve met, who’s met my wife, who I’ve had talked with while at home, and who loved Hawaiian shirts like me. We have daughters the same age, and we’ve shared many conversations over the years. We weren’t that close, but we respected and enjoyed each other’s company often. One of the relatively few people I’d stop and have an extended conversation with when we were together.

I have no details on what happened, and my heart goes out to his wife and family. It’s a stunning day, and as pat of my job, I’ll update a memory a sqlmemorial.org next week. One of the harder posts that I’ll have to write.

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Do We Need to Learn Linux?

Posted on July 10, 2021 by way0utwest

This week we got an announcement about SQL Server in Containers. Microsoft put out a blog noting that the beta program for SQL Server on Windows containers is suspended. They didn’t give any details, citing “ecosystem challenges and usage patterns” as a reason so suspend the program for the foreseeable future.

Not only that, they noted that they were deleting docker hub images for express and developer, which makes sense from their perspective. They don’t want to support these. From the developer perspective, however, this will break and flow, pipelines, or even local scripts from developers. I understand the desire to delete images, but doing so without any notice doesn’t seem like fair treatment for people using them.

This means that if you want to run SQL Server in a container in production, you likely have to use Linux. Windocks has an alternative with Windows, but Microsoft not supporting this is disappointing. I think that containers will be the future of database development, as they standardize and simplify how we can get an environment up and running. They also ensure consistent environments between developers, branches, automated systems and more. I think it’s going to take years, but that’s the direction where I think many of us will go over time. Those days of the Developer Edition will be gone, and instead we’ll just run a container.

I’ve been using Linux containers for a few years, and they make it easy to quickly set up a clean environment with a new instance and a database or two. In that time, I’ve had to use a little Linux at times, but really, I start a container from a command line and then it acts like an instance I’ve installed. There isn’t a reason to actually do much in Linux. At least not for the core database stuff. Most of the ways that you’ll work with a Linux instance as a developer stay the same.

For system administrators and DBAs, however, you might need to learn more. While setting up an instance on Linux isn’t hard, and easier in a container, if you are called on to work in bash, execute sudo, or some other Linux command, you might want some basic familiarity. Fortunately, you don’t need another workstation as Windows 10 includes a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that let’s you play around in Linux inside Windows 10.

I think Linux is fascinating, and it’s evolved in many ways since I first saw it in 1991. Even if it’s not something you expect to use daily, spending a few hours learning how to navigate around and get things done is good for your mind, forcing you to learn a bit. The San Diego TIG did a series a few years ago, and you might go through those meetings or pick up a book and spend some time playing around with something new. You never know when this might be required in your career and a little familiarity could give you a jump start in the future.

Do we need to learn Linux? No, but it’s not a bad idea to build a few skills in this area.

Steve Jones

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Fixing Report Visuals

Posted on July 9, 2021 by way0utwest

I’m not a visual designer, and I find that as I learn a bit more, many of my previous reports contain lots of silly mistakes. They’re often full of data, which I like, but which can be hard for others to follow and understand.

I need to do better, and I do ask for help at times from friends. I also need to get a better process for evaluating if I’m doing a good job. I was thinking about that as I saw a makeover article from storytellingwithdata. It gives a short process of things to consider when building reports.

With most of our software, we go through iterative approaches, either by ourselves, or with others, to try and build something that meets the needs or a client. Reports involve the same process, but I know that often the report process is my showing them something very raw and them asking for changes.

What can be more time consuming is that the numbers are often the thing a client is concerned with early on. Are we calculating things correctly and including enough data. We might go back and forth quite a bit on this part of the report process.

Once we agree, and they are happy, I think I’m done and can move on. However, often this is where they start to now care about the visual appear. The layout, colors, etc., and I am drawn into another report writing session, spending more time on something that is far, far less interesting than writing queries or other software code.

I can see why tools like Power BI, which let the client mess with the visual design, have a lot of appeal. As a software developer, I’m out of the loop here, or more out of the loop. Let them decide they want a vertical or horizontal bar chart, or a stacked line chart. What do I care?

I know visualization, layout, colors, etc. are important. They’re not enough of my job to care, but I do think someone needs to. I’m lucky in that my company has artists, so I can send over slides, reports, etc. and get hints about what I should change. It’s certainly something I wish I’d have had in the past at other jobs, since anything beyond a simple graph or table is well outside my wheelhouse.

Steve Jones

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