SQL Server Engineering in Austin

Posted on May 12, 2025 by way0utwest

I was lucky enough to attend SQL Saturday Austin 2025 a little over a week ago in conjunction with some work at the Redgate office. The opening keynote at the event was given by Conor Cunningham, who is an architect at Microsoft and runs the engineering team in Austin for the Data Platform. His talk was very interesting and engaging. This was about half the room below.

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I’ll describe the talk, which was great, but I’m probably mis-stating something. Keep in mind I’m writing this a few days later from memory.

One of the interesting things Conor talked about was the engineering process in Redmond. The main thrust was that they work in 6 month planning cycles. Work gets submitted, voted on, works through groups, and as a result, most of the things approved are related to more revenue in some way.

Good for Microsoft, not something many of us love.

In Austin, they tackled things differently. You can see the outline in the image below. Conor hired a few engineers here, usually out of college, and they work on new features. Things that are too small to make the list in Redmond, but this also helps grow/train engineers on how to write production quality code.

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What do they work on? He had a few slides, but IS [NOT[ DISTICNT was one. He described this a bit, but the cool thing was a bunch of the SQL 2022 features were from Austin. String_Split with the ordinal, the bit functions, and a bunch more.

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Basically all the cool features I appreciated, including DATETRUNC, came from this small team. I am very glad they exist.

He also delved into the challenges of doing remote work. Building SQL Server is a non trivial procss, and they’ve been working to try and make this easier. They refactor code, they try to break things out so engineers can get quicker feedback, write more tests, etc. to make their software engineering easier.

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He also talked about their work with hardware manufacturers and some of the optimizations he’s done with CPU and the ATX instructions to make SQL Server a little faster. For some types of queries, they’ve great improved the speed of internal SQL Server processing.

It was a great talk and quite entertaining. Hopefully some of you will see it elsewhere, or he’ll do it again in Austin and you can come.

 

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Database DevOps Recommendations

Posted on May 9, 2025 by way0utwest

The DORA organization is constantly researching how to better produce software at any organization. This is similar to work done by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute many years ago. Both groups are trying to determine what things help engineers work better and produce high-quality software.

On the DORA site, there is a database change management page, where they recommend approaches to managing database schemas. The main thing they talk about is treating all schema changes as migrations, which is something some people do. However, many teams also like a desired-state-configuration approach, where they just deploy all the changes from dev (or QA) to prod in a state-based flow. Both can work, but I do think as software matures (and becomes legacy), migrations are preferred. The article lists lots of frameworks in different languages. Flyway is among them, which is the product on which I work and sell at Redgate. If you haven’t looked at a migrations framework, I’d recommend you do so. They do really give you a tremendous amount of control and flexibility. There are trade-offs, so I’m not blindly recommending this approach, but it’s worth educating yourself on how migrations frameworks work.

The other thing they recommend is using a zero-downtime change approach. They list a few strategies that you can use make changes without impacting clients. None of these are hard, but they require a little coordination with application developers, as well as some patience in splitting changes across multiple deployments. They also require good coding practices, so many of us have a few habits to unlearn.

DORA does also recommend considering a NoSQL database since you don’t have downtime from schema changes, but my view is that you’re likely making trade-offs that aren’t worth in. If you read that paragraph in the article, my guess is many application developers read everything but the last sentence, or they dismiss that last sentence. Then they just start developing against a NoSQL database platform and expect it to magically be better. It might be, but it might not work as well.

The one thing I wish they had a better answer for was how to measure our work as database developers. This section doesn’t give you any concrete things to measure, just some suggestions, which are often hard for people to implement in their environment. Most of us don’t have salary or time numbers for others, and need more help in trying to determine how to measure changes. Maybe the one good measurement to aim for is 100% of database changes made by automation, rather than manual execution.

Steve Jones

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A New Word: Lookaback

Posted on May 9, 2025 by way0utwest

lookaback– n.  the chock of meeting back up with someone and learning that your mental image of them had fallen wildly out of date – having grown up or gotten old, fallen apart, or pulled themselves together – which shakes your faith in the accuracy of the social puppet show that runs continuously inside your head.

Most of the time I’ve run into someone after time away, they are similar to what I expect. They’re older, or they’re heavier (as am I) or something, but it’s within the realm of what you might expect after the length of time.

I had lookaback a few times in the last few years, though and it’s a bit jarring. I had someone I knew that went through a rough stretch and they had gained a lot of weight. Like 150lbs more than when I saw them. More than the weight, however, their outlook on life, being a bit depressed and without a light in their eyes was a lookaback shock.

I have lookaback at times with kids I’ve coached, where I see them years later as young adults and I keep this image of a 12 or 13 year old that is now in their twenties, more mature, and much more grown up. It’s a contradiction in my head, as I still keep a glimpse of that younger person.

Lookaback can be positive or negative, and I keep hoping when it happens it’s a positive experience.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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Speaking at the NYC Lunch and Learn–May 23

Posted on May 7, 2025 by way0utwest

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be in New York City for the Redgate DevOps Devour Hour Lunch and Learn. This is at the Industrious office at 730 3rd Avenue, which is a neat location near the tip of Manhattan.

This is a half day event, from 12-430, with a short happy hour afterwards. I’ll be there, along with Kendra Little and Erik Darling, talking a variety of different topics.

  • The SQL Server Performance Tasting Menu – Erik
  • A Tale of Two Clouds: What I Learned from Migrating from Azure SQL MI to Amazon RDS for SQL Server – Kendra
  • Designing Zero Downtime Database Deployments – me

I’m excited to head back to NYC, which is always a fun trip for me. Even more exciting, Erik and Kendra are people who always get me to think with their views of how to work with databases effectively.

My session will be a mix of tech demos and tips/tricks on how to better make changes to your database systems without interrupting customers.

You can register today and I’ll see you in a few weeks.

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