The Next Evolution of Big Blue

Posted on October 27, 2020 by way0utwest

When I was a kid, IBM built typewriters. I actually had one and produced some schoolwork on it. At some point I learned they were a force in large computing. Then they entered the PC market, and eventually the Thinkpad laptops were coveted items. Later I encountered them when a large company I worked for was looking at outsourcing our IT service for Big Blue to run.

In over a 100 years, IBM has thrived, despite ups and downs, and re-invented themselves many times. Early in my career, lots of managers used IBM hardware and software, with the adage that “no one gets fired for buying IBM.” Whether it was the best fit or not, it was hard to get in trouble for using what many others had chosen.

I haven’t heard a lot about IBM lately, but wasn’t surprised to see this article about them spinning off the managed services part of their business. I think that has always been a low margin business, though surprisingly a successful one. It made Ross Perot a very rich man.

However, with the cloud world, margins are higher. The cloud isn’t necessarily cheaper for businesses. They pay more to have flexibility, less up front capital expenditure, and less commitment. While IBM doesn’t often come up when talking about AWS, Azure, and GCP, it’s listed as one of the top 5.

I don’t know if it will catch the others, but I do know more and more companies are looking to cloud and hybrid infrastructure, and I would bet IBM will have lots of success here.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 27 Oct 2020

Posted on October 27, 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 recognize you have a choice about what to priotitise.

I have a few hobbies, and I have various tasks that I need to complete on the ranch. I also like getting to the gym on a regular basis. This is on top of the coaching commitments I have in my life.

Recently I was chatting with a friend and noted that I hadn’t had much time to do any woodworking lately. It’s been busy, and the time I’ve used in my shop has been to try and fix some things around the ranch. When I noted that I was too busy, the person said I needed to prioritize this if it was important.

That is true. While I wasn’t looking for a solution, and I know this is the case, it’s a good reminder. I put my time in the gym, and my time coaching at a higher priority than some of my other hobbies, so I choose to do those more often, and before I take time for something else.

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SQL Server Phone Home

Posted on October 26, 2020 by way0utwest

A few versions ago Microsoft added the Customer Experience Improvement Service to the SQL Server platform. This is the CEIP service, and it comes with SQL Server. It is designed to get telemetry from your operation of a SQL Server instance on your premises. If you have Standard or Enterprise, you can turn this off, but if you use Developer or Eval, you cannot. Brent wrote a short description of this service recently, which is a good summary.

When this first came out, there was a lot of concern with regards to data privacy, but I suspect most of this is overblown. Microsoft is bound by the GDPR, and my conversations with employees over the years have convinced me they take this seriously. Not just the legal staff, but many of the developers were surprised by the detail and documentation that they had to provide in order to gather data.

Microsoft documents about what they collect, as well as the access restrictions at Microsoft and the data retention. I don’t see anything here that I am too concerned about, but I do think this is a great template that many organizations could use to document what data they capture from customers, how it is used, and how long they keep it. Whether you are required to do this or not now, I suspect more of us will be required to do this over time. You could start doing this now and be prepared early.

This isn’t a fun task, and it’s very tedious, but if you capture this data and adjust it as you evolve and alter your schema, it’s not too bad. If you also include a place to document this, you can then work on this over time, not as one big, long, really annoying project. As data documentation has become more important to many of the customers I deal with at Redgate, having the ability to work on this over time is helpful in any size organization.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

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Daily Coping 26 Oct 2020

Posted on October 26, 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 set hopeful but realistic goals for the week ahead.

It’s time to get back to work and buckle down a bit. PASS recordings are due today, the conference is a couple weeks away, and I need to prep for it and a few more events coming up.

This week, I have a few things to do.

  1. PASS recordings uploaded
  2. Complete a new article I started on containers.
  3. Get 5 new questions written for SSC
  4. Spend a couple hours reading one of my goal books this week
  5. Get in five workouts, including a swim.
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