The Virtual Experience

Posted on November 16, 2020 by way0utwest

I just completed the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit a few weeks ago, and it was enlightening to me to see that so many people liked this experience. They appreciated not traveling, being able to drop in and out of sessions while near their home and family. I found that lots of people also liked the MVP Summit last spring, which was also virtual.

The PASS Summit went virtual recently, and I went through an all day pre-con as well as a few sessions during the week. As many of you, I’m a bit screen and Zoom fatigued, and while I enjoy learning and seeing people passionate about a technology, I’m tired of seeing it inside these four walls.

I worry that I’m in the minority. I recognize the value of the inclusion of those that don’t have the time or money to attend a conference live. I appreciate that the ability to watch when and where it fits into my schedule. I love that others can pause, rewind, get captions, and more that spread knowledge out.

However, I think we’ve lost something, and certainly lost some of the collaborative, discussions and debates that we can have in live events. While I can reach out and discuss with anyone, it’s hard to discuss with just someone. Others can join in, and semi-private channels, and especially the times during breaks when I can get up and walk while talking, are things I miss in the virtual experience.

If virtual events were spread out more, and not everything in my work world were virtual, perhaps I would feel differently, but for now, I don’t love the virtual experience, and feel it’s a pale shadow of a SQL Saturday, user group, or live conference. I hope that this isn’t something I do too often, but I suspect this will be a permanent part of our lives forever.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 16 Nov 2020

Posted on November 16, 2020 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.

Today’s tip is to find out something new about someone you care about.

I asked someone recently how they were doing during this tough time. They told me that they hadn’t been able to visit a parent in a retirement facility and only were able to video call with Skype.

This surprised me, as the person was younger than I was, and I had assumed their parents would not be in that level of care. Shows what I get for assuming.

I felt bad, and know what this is like, though my mother is far enough away that I can’t visit her often. I was supposed to go last month, but illness made me cancel. However, this person has their parent just a few miles away.

Heartbreaking.

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How Do You Experiment?

Posted on November 13, 2020 by way0utwest

One of the things that DevOps asks software developers to do is experiment. Try new ideas out, get feedback quickly, and then choose how to grow or stop your experiment. This is great for features, and it works well for application software.

The general flow for this is to talk to customers, and then decide what to build. In some sense, this can work, but as I heard at the DOES Summit recently, if Henry Ford had asked his early on customers what to build, they’d have asked for a faster horse.

Customers are limited by their current experience. This includes not only end users, but for us database pros, the developers that build software. When they want to experiment, they often need some backing from the database to store information and query it.

If we want to help enable experiments, and allow our software to evolve, there are two things we need to deal with in experiments. One is schema changes, either through new data buckets in tables, or programmable objects, such as views, functions, and procedures Adding these, or removing them when experiments aren’t useful, can be cumbersome and difficult. It’s amazing how quickly we create dependencies and how slow we are to remove them.

The other area is in ensuring that we properly or appropriately, handle resource usage. Do we go back and tune queries, or restructure the way that we’ve indexed items to ensure that our system works optimally? Some tuning can be done early, and should be, but some requires some feedback to understand query patterns or data loads.

Today, I’m wondering how, or if, you experiment in database work. What works for you, or what doesn’t? Or do you hate the idea of experiments in the database world and want more specification up front? Let me know with a comment.

Steve Jones

Note: Podcasts are suspended for a week as I deal with the PASS Summit.

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Daily Coping 13 Nov 2020

Posted on November 13, 2020 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.

Today’s tip is to be creative. Cook, draw, write, paint, make, or inspire.

I like creativity. It’s a part of my job and my life, as I often need to think about how to write. I’m also a little creative in my life, as I cook most of the meals, fix things, play guitar, and sometimes actually build something interesting.

This week, I’ve started going back through my guitar courses and practicing. Today, to relax during the PASS Virtual Summit, I’ve kept a guitar handy and just mindlessly played some riffs over and over as I watched some talks.

I’m also hoping to get “Lovely Day” good enough that I can play it tonight for my wife. She loves that song.

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