Tag: automation

I wrote a piece on automation and time savings, and of course, Derik Hammer had to point out another post and xkcd cartoon that splashes some reality on automation. I’ve included it below, and certainly there are some good points made in the cartoon. It is incredibly easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to complete a software project, especially when you include maintenance. Make no mistake about it, scripting little tasks and adding code into SQL Agent jobs is building software.

The decision to undertake automation shouldn’t be strictly made on the math of time savings. There are a number of other gains to consider. The post linked above notes that the fact that interruptions can be minimized through automation can be very valuable. I know many people discount the cost of disruptions, but they can be high, especially for knowledge work. This reason alone might be worth spending time on automation.

I feel that building some automated processes is a great way to actually practice skills you might use elsewhere. Automating tasks is practical, and even if the exact method isn’t a technology you regularly engage in, the mental practice of working through a problem and developing a solution is valuable. Just engaging your brain on a problem can be a good use of some time.

Those people that have followed the ideas in DevOps for years know that one of the main powers of automation is consistency and repeatability. We know that humans are bad at being consistent and reliable, and those are the places we should use computers. Even if the time savings don’t directly add up, I’m sure the chance of you breaking something, forgetting a step, or even neglecting a task are likely work a little bit of automation time in your job.

You don’t want to get caught up cerating a large side project to automate something, but little scripts to save time are definitely valuable.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8 MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

Recently I ran across a nice post from Joey D’Antoni about not installing SQL Server from the GUI. It’s a good post, and it reminds me that I should be using this technique each time I build a new VM, but what really struck me was the cartoon from XKCD he linked in. Here it is:

When I look at the cartoon, it seems that it’s easy to waste a lot of time on repetitive tasks. And it is. This is one of the great pet peeves of programmers who look to automate tasks so that they don’t have to worry about repeating them. The power of computers is in repeating instructions over and over again, something that humans struggle with. We make mistakes, we get bored, and this isn’t a good use of our time.

However the cartoon distorts things a bit since the time lost is across 5 years. I don’t know how many tasks I have that take 5 seconds, but I do have some 30s tasks, and certainly a few that take a couple minutes. Even if I do them daily, that means if I automate them in less than a day, I’ve saved time. However, some of my automated tasks still require me to spend some time on them, so my savings aren’t always realized.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth automated in some way. I work on an Excel sheet almost daily, and each time I do, I change dates, which takes 10-15s to do. I spent about 5 minutes automating this, so I save time, but more importantly, I reduce tedium and stress, and that can be one of the best reasons to automate. Those simple tasks we dread might be the best items to automate. Of course, keep things simple, since you have to support your automation over time.

There are also the tasks that are better handled through automation. Many of us know that checking to see if all our SQL Agent jobs succeeded or if there are any errors in log files is something best handled through automation. Those simple tasks that many of us may consider part of our jobs are items that are easily automated, and more importantly, if those are the only tasks we perform, it’s entirely possible we’ll be considered redundant and obsolete over time.

I would urge you to learn to automate those pieces of your job you do regularly. Use Powershell, T-SQL, Agent, whatever, but make your job  less stressful and less tedious. It’s good for your career, for your job retention, and it’s fun. Besides, I’ve never run out of work, so removing tedium from my job hasn’t resulted in me being less valuable as a DBA or developer.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.