Daily Coping 12 Mar 2021

Posted on March 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 bring to mind people you care about and send love to them.

My direct family is very important to me, and I try to think about them and let them know regularly. Extended family less, but they are still people I care and worry about.

However, there are others in the community that I contact less, and I want to take time to think about them for a few minutes. I don’t want to name people directly, but I’ll generally remember think about them in this post.

I have a friend that is struggling with work and professional changes during the pandemic. We’ve been trying to get together, but it’s been hard. I sympathize, but I also know how busy I can get and how stress can increase if friends are reaching out a lot. As a result, I’ve tried to not put pressure on us getting together. Just a few “hope you’re doing well” notes.

Another friend is in a new role. Busy, trying to impress, trying to do more, and enjoying it. I’m hoping this person is doing well and I’m looking forward to seeing them sometime in the next year.

I’ve got someone I used to see regularly in my travels, and have enjoyed many drinks and meals over the years. I’m missing those interactions, but I see from their activity that they seem to be coping, probably better than I have been. I’m cheering them on today.

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The Cloudy Future in 2021

Posted on March 11, 2021 by way0utwest

Ignite took place recently, and the keynote from Satya Nadella was interesting, and if you have time, interesting to watch. If not, there’s an excerpt in written form. In any case, I like his passion and excitement about the future. I’m slightly sad that he’s not on stage somewhere, and instead in a studio of some sort, but that’s the world today.

There were five pillars of the keynote which related to the future of the cloud. One of these was the idea that we are at “peak centralized computing” now, but we need to get more decentralized. The idea here, I think, is that we will have more of the computing services taking place outside of data centers and server rooms, and in more devices. We already see some of this, with mobile devices, cars, sensors, and more handling some computing loads.

The Edge is something Microsoft continues to push, and I think the adoption of this paradigm will continue, with some pre-processing or filtering occurring in devices or intermediate servers, and then less, or limited, data being loaded into our database platforms. I also expect that we’ll see more data loaded into a database somewhere, and less ETL into another platform and more just in time querying from a client or other data store.

I was also glad that trust was a pillar, though I think this was an attempt to corral a number of disparate ideas into one topic. However, the idea of data protection, and individual rights such as privacy, are important, and I do think that Microsoft recognizes this. Even if they are just trying to build a product to profit, I appreciate the work they are doing in this area, adding new capabilities to allow companies to better control, limit access, and protect data in flexible ways. Now, if we can just get the companies to respect the individual’s data they hold, I think the world will be better.

Lots of what Microsoft presents in their keynotes and conferences is aspirational, with limited experience or understanding of whether customers really will adopt these ideas. Every year I see some visions that don’t ever get widely used across the next year and aren’t mentioned the next year. However, some of their ideas are good, and some will evolve in different ways to help improve our world. This year, I loved seeing the remote ways HoloLens 2 is being used.

I never know what will catch on, but I do like seeing the visions that others have for our world.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 11 Mar 2021

Posted on March 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 talk three calm breaths at regular intervals during the day.

Stop for a minute, and take a few breaths. I’ve learned that from practicing yoga. For a few years, I pushed to adopt poses and work as quickly as I could. Then I realized that breathing really matters, and slowing my breath can be challenging.

I’ve also seen that breathing deep at different points in my day can relax my body. It can reduce some stress, and it clears my head.

I’m not big on meditation, but I do like to pause at times and breath. Consciously, deeply, and controlled.

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The Ease of Containers

Posted on March 10, 2021 by way0utwest

I first heard about containers in 2012. I went to a conference on software delivery and talked with a gentleman that was using them in his Java application, mostly because the Java app had version issues and would leak memory. He could run hundreds of instances of the app on each server and handle a load, allowing each to be built, run, and then get destroyed in minutes.

Since then, I’ve come to appreciate containers as a way to isolate workloads of specific applications. They became very popular a few years ago, and many developers and companies were looking at them. Since then, the hype has cooled, but I find that the used of containers is still growing, and certainly my use is growing as well.

In the last year, I’ve experimented with a few different pieces of software in containers. Rather than try to install a number of dependencies on my system, I’ve downloaded a container, mapped a volume, and been up and running much quicker than I would have been otherwise. My experiments with Jekyll were one of the recent examples.

I also got a demo from someone at Redgate recently that included a container file, allowing me to use VS Code, but develop and run in a container, avoiding dependencies on my machine. I was up and running with this software in minutes. I was truly impressed with the ease of getting started, and the simplicity for me to actually run and debug code.

I still don’t see a lot of database container work in production, or even in development. We get requests from customers, but often it’s a wish, and they aren’t even sure how they’d get started. While I think database development with containers is fantastic, you do need to have a good dataset available that you can use inside the container to keep resource usage low and make this a viable environment.

I still expect the future of database development to be in containers, especially as we start to have more and more applications connecting to multiple data sources. That’s going to take some time, but I still think learning about, and experimenting with, containers is a great skill for you to have. It’s also an impressive topic on which to have a few stories ready for your next interview.

Steve Jones

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