Self-Care–Using Vacation

Posted on February 1, 2021 by way0utwest

I spent most of my work as a bit of a workaholic. Not that I worked too many crazy hours or spent all my time at work, because I didn’t. I had some rough stretches, but I’ve mostly worked 45-50 hours a week for the majority of my career, in all positions.

However, I struggled to take vacation. In fact, I rarely took more than a few days. Even now, after about 4 days I’m usually ready to go back to work. I am trying to do better, but it’s hard. Or maybe it’s a sign I have a great job and love what I do.

In any case, I’m trying to be better in a different way. My family enjoys winter, and while travel is restricted in a variety of ways, we do have season passes for the Colorado mountains and a place up there. We usually rent it out, but there haven’t been any since last year. That might start changing, but for the time being, we’ve tried to take advantage of the space.

We took a couple trips up there in December, and one a couple weeks ago. We’re back up this week for a few more days, and I’ve even lent it out to my nephew in a few weeks (though I may come up for a day). No long trips, but I’m trying to take them regularly and get away.

See you later this week.

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The Database Server Upgrade for Let’s Encrypt

Posted on February 1, 2021 by way0utwest

Let’s Encrypt is a service the provides free SSL certificates for web servers. They have grown from a small project to a critical service on the web that serves over 235mm clients each year, and often issues over 1.5mm certificates each day. They depend on a MariaDB database to support this, and recently, they released a post on the database server upgrade they made. They run physical hardware on a managed services provider (Datto), rather than using a cloud platform service, which is fine. While cloud services are great, they aren’t always the best choice. I’d like to see them talk about any evaluation as to what Datto is better than, say, AWS.

In any case, I like seeing how people upgrade hardware, as well as the impact of changes. I haven’t always done this when I’ve upgraded my home systems, though I do notice the new one always runs faster. Good for me, but for production systems, we should have better metrics, if for no other reason than to better learn how to size the next upgrade.

In this case, Let’s Encrypt has a great post that shows how the hardware changed. They moved from Intel to AMD, 48 threads to 128 threads, doubled RAM, and went from mid 500MB/s read/writes to 3200MB/s. Their response metrics also improved, with API requests going from 90ms to 9ms. CPU dropped from 90% to 25% and latency is a third of previous values. Quite an impressive change.

I like seeing the details of their change, and I think this is a nice pattern for others to think about. Whether you spec out machines, VMs in AWS, or DTUs in Azure. You ought to have some metrics that matter for your customers, and then compare the before and after. Prove your upgrade worked, or maybe prove that you need to alter your specs after the upgrade. One advantage with a cloud provider is that you can often scale up or down as needed. With an MSP, it might be harder, but I bet you can still change hardware fairly quickly if you suspect a problem.

While we all want to test a new configuration before we turn it on, simulating a workload can be challenging. Clients somehow always seem to find ways to stress systems we hadn’t anticipated. When spec’ing out a new system, make sure you have room to grow if you’ve underestimated how the new system performs. You also might set specific targets that aim to improve your metrics to some level. Even if you don’t hit the estimate, you will learn something about your methodology that can help you improve your guess for the future.

Above all, publish something like Let’s Encrypt. Share some data and help our industry move forward. We’ve love to have you write something for SQLServerCentral.

Steve Jones

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

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Goal Progress–Jan 2021

Posted on January 29, 2021 by way0utwest

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

As I look at goal progress for 2021, I’m going to follow a similar pattern as last year. I’ll give myself a current grade and report on overall progress in of the areas where I set goals.

Current Grade: C

I think I’m making some progress, but perhaps not as much as I’d like. I started this post last week, but with Redgate buying the PASS assets, this week has been almost a loss for anything work or career related.

Reading

The goal was 4 books (3 non-fiction, 1 tech). Here’s the current progress:

Technical Skills

I’m solving the Advent of Code three times.  I’m also studying for certification.

  • Certification –  AZ-900 – 0%
  • Certification – DP-200 – 0%
  • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 4/25
  • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 1/25
  • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 0/25
  • Skills – TBD

Projects

I had a few projects for myself. Most of January was supporting SQL Memorial as well as doing some SQL Saturday/Data Saturday stuff. So far things appear to be working fine.

  • Support events: submitted and approved some PRs.
  • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
  • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
  • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 20%
  • SQL Memorial – 80% – This is mostly done, but working on some networking changes. I also need to move the repo out of my personal account, but this also entails pipeline changes, possibly security issues with hosting, etc.
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Daily Coping 28 Jan 2021

Posted on January 28, 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 take a small step towards an important goal.

I try to set some career goals each year, things that I work on outside of, or in conjunction with, my daily work. Driving yourself forward is a challenge, and it can be easy to forget about your goals.

I’ve got a few this year, one of which is pursuing some Azure certification. I do keep working with Azure in different ways, such as getting SQL Memorial going, but I haven’t been focused on leveling out my knowledge across the platform.

Pursuing AZ-900  (Azure Fundamentals) is a goal, mostly because it will force me to dig into the platform. I recently took a couple hours to work through the learning paths, with a notepad and pen, taking notes and trying to grow and learn. I scheduled a couple meeting times for myself to focus, and hopefully I’ll continue to work on those in the coming months.

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