Looking to Role Models

Posted on February 13, 2021 by way0utwest

I’ve spoken at many conferences and user groups over the years. These have been one of the more enjoyable times in my career, and I encourage people to give it a try. You may not like it, but it can be exciting, rewarding, and certainly helpful in your career.

One of the things that helped me start speaking and gain confidence that I could do it was seeing other people I personally knew deliver a presentation. They were a role model, and they gave me the confidence to start.

In a few weeks, the Women in Technology virtual group is putting on a Data Platform WIT Day, with a lineup of speakers that are covering a wide variety of topics, and are great role models for anyone, but especially women in our industry.

Many of us wander through our careers, and often look to others to help inspire us to set, work towards, and achieve goals. The SQL Server community has shared, inspired, and supported each other in a way I haven’t seen in other areas. I am glad to see that we have different groups that continue to do this, even in this difficult pandemic time.

Steve Jones

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Social: A Slight Improvement in My Life

Posted on February 12, 2021 by way0utwest

This isn’t a tech or SQL related post, so feel free to move on if you are looking for something like that.

Some of you may know that I coach a competitive volleyball team. I’ve been doing this for the last few years, even since my daughter grew up and I didn’t have as much of a chance to see her play any longer. This has been a welcome respite from life, and usually I spend 10-15 hours a week, from November to May, coaching.

With the pandemic last year, my season was cut short. We competed on Mar 8, and all activity stopped on Mar 11, halfway through our season. I was sad, and missed the kids. We did do some practicing and training in June to get them ready for the next year, but it wasn’t the same.

We had no idea what to think about the 2021 season, but in August, Colorado cleared the clubs to start doing some practice. Since the high school season was postponed, we flipped out season somewhat and moved on to train and compete in October. With much of school virtual, and me not traveling, this was a nice break. Only about 7-8 hours a week instead of more, but we competed.

November saw Colorado’s second wave and things shut down. We stopped everything for a few weeks, and then with state permission, were able to train 2-3 kids at a time. Not what I want, not what I signed up for, but still a bit of a release from life. There were a few small competitions in December, but I thought our season would get cancelled again.

A few weeks ago we got permission to start practicing as a team. The idea was to restart the season on 7 Feb. The week before, we were told the state hadn’t approved anything, so we cancelled that date.

Then on the 5th of Feb, we got a note that Colorado’s numbers had improved, and we were going to have a tournament on President’s Day weekend, 13-15 Feb. Still limited. Instead of in a large convention space, we would be spread out to small gyms, limited numbers of athletes inside, no parents. Still, something.

We also got word that the season schedule was pushed back, but still proceeding. Working around the high school season, which will start in March, but life will get back to normal for 10 hours a week for me.

I do worry about safety, and I think holding tech events doesn’t make sense, and it has a higher risk. My kids play in masks, there are limited numbers, and we avoid most contact with other athletes in a large, open space.

So far, through fall competition, we haven’t seen safety issues or outbreaks. Fingers crossed that continues.

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Daily Coping 12 Feb 2021

Posted on February 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 share what you’re feeling with someone you really trust.

I don’t have a lot of people that I trust too much, but I do have a few. One person in particular outside my family is a good friend that I don’t get enough time with. We’re both busy, physically separated, and not always in contact.

However, I did take some time recently to sit and chat, and let them know some of my struggles with life and the pandemic. I’ve mostly had a good year, but it’s been very hard, stressful, and at times, very unproductive.

I don’t know that I’ve been depressed, as Paul Randal wrote, but  I’ve not been much better for some stretches. Sharing that with someone helped me feel a little better about the struggles I’ve had.

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Column vs Row

Posted on February 11, 2021 by way0utwest

I’ve been working with databases for a long time. They’ve always been relational databases to me, unless they were a key-value, document, or NoSQL class of store. A few years ago at the Pass Summit, David Dewitt gave a keynote on changes to storage that Microsoft was implementing, talking about columnar storage.

At first the structure felt confusing, but as he proceeded, it started to make sense. We don’t like SELECT * for many reasons, but one is that lots of unnecessary data gets moved off disk, into memory, and across a network. This is the nature of a row based store, which is what we usually have in relational databases.

The columnar store puts all the columns together. The row values from different columns are separate, but if you are aggregating values in columns, the columnar store works very well.

So well, that we have columnstore indexes in SQL Server, which copy your data into a column-oriented format. While this might seem wasteful, you decide what gets copied, and you get the benefits of this format, which dramatically speeds up some types of queries.

The reason we have both stores is that we have a need for both to fulfill different query needs. I wouldn’t keep both stores for every table, but for some, it’s the best way to ensure your clients don’t spend a lot of time waiting for results.

I see more clients using columnstore indexes, and I was still seeing some sessions, but not as many as a few years back when the technology was new. If you’ve never tried building a columnstore index, this might be something you experiment with in development systems and understand how this can change your query performance and storage needs. We have a great Stairway Series to get you started, so take some time this year and read through it and practice the examples.

Steve Jones

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

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