Social: Keeping Perspective

Posted on August 21, 2020 by way0utwest

I was lucky enough to be able to get together with some friends recently, outside, socially distanced, and relax with a few drinks. The few of us together have different types of careers, we’re different ages, we have much different perspectives on the world. We also end up dealing with people in the world in much different ways and places on a regular basis. While some of my friends are at home, some work in town and some go to an office.

We talked a bit about the unrest in one of our local communities, Aurora, CO. It has been the site of protests, and unfortunately, violence against both members of the community and police. I support protest, I do not support violence.

In any case, a few of my friends, who are white, noted that some police officers don’t like to go out in the community, even for things like groceries. People yell at them, or give them mean/bad/angry looks. One of my friends has a truck that looks like some of the undercover police vehicles, and he’s been yelled at by random people who think he’s a law enforcement officer.

Their thoughts were that there are bad police, but to lump everyone together in one group isn’t fair.

That’s a powerful statement. It’s also from a specific perspective. Someone that sympathizes with the change in the lives of the police, with their discomfort with the status quo not being the same. With police not being respected.

My statement was, think about lumping everyone on the protester side, or the Person of Color side. How often have black people, or middle easterners, or asians, or women been lumped together? How often have you taken a stance based on your tribe, on who you identify with?

Most of us do it often. Tribal identity is a human characteristic. We often choose to identify with others. We also allow a narrative, a story, a certain presentation to influence us. This has been shown in study after study. We often are less unbiased than we think.

It is sad that police don’t feel welcome in their community. It’s also sad that many others feel discriminated against or oppressed. It’s distressing that we don’t all get along better, even with basic respect if there isn’t any reason to like each other.

We all need to do better, both in our behavior and in the way we look at others.

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Daily Coping 21 Aug 2020

Posted on August 21, 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 share an encouraging news story to inspire others.

The news is full of bad stuff. I really enjoyed the SGN network, and I hope it comes back soon. In any case, I try not to check too often, mostly because there is lots of bad news.

However, I have some good news. Or at least maybe, no news about something, which is good news.

I coach volleyball and half our season was cancelled this spring. Sometime late in the spring, there was an opportunity for us to bring our team to the AAU national finals in Orlando, FL, USA. I had no interest in going, nor did the parents of the kids I coached, but some teams were interested. The club where I coach ended up sending 3 teams in mid July to Orlando.

At a time when case, deaths, and more from COVID-19 were growing.

The event ended up going fine, with no kids, coaches, or parents getting sick. Lots of precautions, lots of spacing, and things worked out well. A review of the event talked about some of the things that they did to keep everyone safe. So far, reviews from other coaches, news, etc., show that there haven’t been any outbreaks from this event.

I wondered how things would work. We have held practice in Colorado since late May, sometimes girls masked, sometimes not, but without incident. There have been some people with fevers or other concerns, with those affected skipping events and getting tested, but so far no spread or positive cases.

That’s good news.

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What’s the Bus Factor?

Posted on August 21, 2020 by way0utwest

I was on a webinar recently and someone mentioned the bus factor, which is a phrase I’d heard before, but not in a long time. Essentially this is the number of people, or maybe a certain specific group of people, who can get hit by a bus before your organization has serious issues.

Do you explicitly know who is important in your organization? I’m sure most executives think their personal factor is 1, meaning they can’t disappear without issues. I’m not sure I agree, though certainly we can’t lose all executives at once. In one small company I worked in, we never put more than two execs in a plane or car for a trip out of town, just in case something happened.

This week, I wonder what your bus factor is in technology. If you think about your projects, your applications and infrastructure, do you know who the critical people are and how many are needed to keep things going? Or could everyone quit and new hires would take over. In other words:

How many people can get hit by a bus before your org fails?

I think that in Redgate, we don’t have many people that are irreplaceable. We have four advocates, and while we have different strengths and abilities, we can fill in for each other. Likely our advocate factor is 4. We’d struggle slightly if all four of us left, though I think our sales engineers and some developers could fill in for us.

In development, we move people around regularly, and while they are valuable and great contributors, I think we could work around a large number of them leaving. I have no idea how many would cripple the company, but it would have to be a number much greater than 10.

It’s worth recognizing when you have people in critical positions that are hard to replace. Do you have a single COBOL programmer still keeping something going, or maybe just one long time employee that knows how the BizTalk server runs and no one else makes changes. Think about it today, and let us know if you think there are single points of failure in your organization.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

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Admin Challenges Across Scale and Time

Posted on August 20, 2020 by way0utwest

I’ve never been interested in working on large systems. I know some people relish the challenge, and certainly there is a lot to learn, but I’ve always valued my sleep and time with family. I like getting away from work, seeing my wife and kids, and I’ve found enough after hours work on (relatively) small systems to keep me occupied. To be fair, I’ve often dealt with large in terms of numbers of systems, rather than a large single system. For some reason, managing 200-300 instances that have 50GB databases is much less stressful than a 10TB single instance, at least for me.

In 1999, I was offered a job managing a 13TB database on SQL Server v6.5. I declined that job, and was glad I did. Running that system would have been a nightmare.  I think a 40TB SQL Server 2017 instance is likely easier to manage, though maybe Taryn Pratt would have taken either challenge. I was interested to see her writeup on migrating a 40TB database recently, though I’m glad I don’t manage this system..

Even if you don’t have a large multi-TB system, the challenges Taryn faced are similar to ones I’ve had on smaller systems, where I was still space constrained. In some places, a 50GB system might be limited in storage, and you might encounter some of the same issues. You also might have the same moving target problem, where the information you are moving keeps changing and your processes struggle to catch up.

This is the type of documentation and evaluation that I’d like to see more people produce about their daily (or weekly or yearly) challenges. Having examples of what worked, maybe what didn’t, and the thoughts behind solving problems helps others learn and grow their skills. Even if you only write this for internal co-workers, it’s a good learning experience.

It’s also good practice for your communication skills, which are going to be very important in the new normal of pandemic work environments.

I’d love to publish more stories like this, of how you solved the challenges you face as a developer or DBA. If you can write about things, send me a draft. If you need help anonymizing things for your employer, I’m happy to help. If you don’t want to do this publicly, at least consider documenting this type of effort internally. Others might learn, and you’ll have a nice item to present to your boss at review time.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

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